Steam Workshop - Valvetime talktime - Episode 2

Hello, and welcome to episode 2 of ValveTime TalkTime. We're back due to popular demand, as they say. That is a total lie... No, we got some very good comments from the last video. People said they liked the episode, they liked the show, and they said they'd like to see some more from us, so we're back again. It's me, Glenn, again. ...I think that makes sense. John is here with me. John? Hi, guys. But Glenn, it's kind of a lie because I kind of paid them to say that. Well how's your week been, John? You're our artist in residence. It's been busy. Good, and Nick, video editor extraordinaire, are you here? Yeah, I'm here, hello. Also been a busy week getting the interview out with James, so that was good. Yeah, James, you did an interview with CakeBread of Stanley Parable, didn't you this week? Yes, yes, Davey Wreden; we're best friends now. Yeah, you can go and watch that video somewhere below me or to the left or right. Nick, do you want to do an annotation at this point? I'll put an annotation somewhere, yeah. You should put it on my face. Can you put it on my face? Please, in order to listen to the interview, click on my face. This is getting weird. Okay, so yeah, click on James' face, but if you want to stay with us, which I think you should also do and click his face after, first let's answer some questions about last week. We got a bunch of comments last week--just want to answer a couple of those and feedback to some people. So, firstly, MrSamuelAdam4 said "ValveTime? Oddly reminds me of ToolTime." Anyone know what that means? [Note from subtitler: Apparently nobody at ValveTime ever watched Home Improvement.] ...Okay, right, thanks, Samual, anyway. Tornados2111: "[This let] me get to know you guys and lets me appreciate valve time more because I understand how much work and how many people are really behind it," which is really nice, actually, so don't insult Tornado. That's really nice of him. Yeah, that's quite nice. Yeah, as much as I joke around about Nick being the worst person to work with ever, (and vice versa) I know that he puts a ton of work producing the videos and trying to get them out on time after I've delivered audio like 3 days late, so... Yeah, exactly, and you've also got John with all the art that he does as well and you've got the guys who post the articles and find things on the website which are not on the show. Yeah, you don't even know their names, do you? I don't know their names, no. Neither do I. Just the slaves. We'll bring them on in future episodes and I will introduce them to you guys as if they're my best friends and you'll never know. Next one was from a guy called fustachioed says, "Add a girl to your team, 4 guys is a? bit much." Any ideas if we could do that? John, we could put you in a dress. I'll be very honest: I would love to see that... John in a dress? This is getting weird. No, no. No, having a more diverse team if at all possible. I don't want to take people onto the team just to fill things to be more diverse, but I would be very happy if that was something that we were able to attract talent for. Well when we look for more people to be joining us in the future, we'll need more people as we continue to expand in the future, so we may well do that in the near future. Ginger the Raptor asked, "Who does the ValveTime voice at the start of the videos?" Somebody want to answer that? I've already answered it in the comments, actually; it's Merle Dandridge, the woman who voices Alyx Vance in Half-Life 2. It is indeed. And the last question we've got here from camycamera says that he would pay-- well actually this on-topic for last week, we talked about the Steam Box-- he said that he'd pay $200 and Helder Pinto said they'd pay about $500 max. I think that's generally the prices that we talked about last week, which we thought were about reasonable, but as we said, modular box is for your grandma, for a teenager, whatever-- different prices for different people. So yeah, that was a general cross-section of what we had from feedback from the first video, but this week we'll be talking about Steam Workshop and how it's affected Valve's approach to game development, how it's changed their games, and what the difference is between games that have got it and that didn't have it or are getting it and how that's changed things. So, this is off the back of some news late last week: Left 4 Dead 2 has now got workshop support and I think CS:GO is now in closed beta. Yeah, it is. Yeah, so that will have, perhaps by the time this video's gone out or maybe in a couple weeks' time, Workshop will be live for CS:GO as well, something that Counter-Strike's never had in the past. But it's really changed the spectrum for Valve games in Workshop. It's allowed people to get more involved from the community, develop their own products they want to put into the game and it's actually projected some people into the industry by doing so-- they've earned a lot of money from doing it. It's been quite impressive, so how do you guys think it's changed? Let's just take some Valve games that they've brought in the last couple of years. How has it changed the games, having Workshop? I would say one thing that Workshop has done is it has removed a lot of barriers to getting your work out there and seen by people. A way, way long time ago I actually made... I was super fancy, doing Day of Defeat: Source and made a few orange maps because that was a very popular thing at the time-- doing these maps that were all just dev textures. So, it's actually kind of difficult getting your stuff out there so that people will play it. You need to rely on all the people who run the servers, they need to look at your map and be like, "Yeah, okay, this sounds cool," and then load it onto their server and it's just complicated. It's very involved, so, as a result, you don't really get a whole lot of exposure. With something like Workshop, my incredibly terrible maps that were very poorly-optimized and looked really awful very easily could have reached a much wider audience, been a lot easier for people to access and see. Now, I feel like that is, in itself, both a good and bad thing for the very reasons that I'm stating. It's very easy to flood the market with really, really bad maps. It's already pretty flooded as it is and now more barriers have been removed. However, at the same time, people who do become popular... Hopefully what will end up happening is more people of quality map-making skill will become visible. On that basis, James, do you... Obviously you've got more exposure. You know, you go on the Workshop, you can now vote things, use the thumbs up / thumbs down system, which is quite simplistic but people do comment and give feedback and try to improve things. I've seen projects come along a lot further from the original inception by the feedback they've been given, which is amazing. Feedback's one of the best things you can get as a modder, someone who's trying to develop anything from the people who are looking at it. Do you thumbs up / thumbs down? Do people who are watching this video, do you thumbs up / thumbs down things from Workshop? Are you involved in the feedback process? Do people do that? I personally am not. I don't know about the rest of you. If something stands out enough for me that I really enjoy it, I'll give them feedback and vote up or down for it. Yeah, I'm more likely to like or dislike something on there rather than comment or get involved because usually it's... I haven't actually used the Workshop all that much, to be honest, which sounds kind of surprising, but I've only really used it for Portal 2. I did like and dislike on that, but never really got involved in the creation side, giving people feedback, even though I probably should have. I think more people should as well, but personally, no, I haven't. On the Portal Workshop, it's quite scary-- As James was just saying, you've removed a lot of barriers and the Portal Workshop is so simplistic--the editor is so simplistic-- that there's literally almost no barriers anymore and the scale and volume of content which is quite bad is astounding. I don't know if that's benefitted it or made it more difficult to find what you're looking for, but certainly a lot of other games have really benefitted from it. Dota 2, look at that. Left 4 Dead 2, already a lot of items have gone out-- I think it's 800 now since the video, when it was 300-ish. Yeah, we talk about Valve and the amount of power they've got in terms of people that work with them and the amount of expertise they've got to give time to develop these things and they just don't have the manpower to create the amount of content which comes out of Steam Workshop, so we're seeing so much more than they used to be able to develop. You know, compare this to TF2--how often items used to comes out, the first couple of hats, which they're now getting rid of. You know, how long it takes to put those things together while seeing the community developer rolling them out week on week, we can see new things from one week to the next. The Workshop has so many new items. Surely that's a better thing to have all this new content on a weekly basis. Yeah, in terms of TF2, it's having a workforce you don't pay that are simply working for fun or for imaginary pay that they might get eventually--they might not ever get paid for it, but they might. So I think that's a kind of mental incentive to actually work for this stuff. And, if nothing else, to get experience modeling or making textures or learning how to import it into a game, which is experience for wider industry jobs. Do you think that's changed people's approach to Workshop now? When people originally started off, was it just for fun? Now are people seeing these interviews on PC Gamer where some people had made 6-figure salaries and now have started up their own game studios just from making a couple of hats-- do you think people are now looking at it from the wrong perspective? I think it's a bit of both. Yeah, I wouldn't say it's the wrong perspective; I'd say it's just a different perspective than it was in the beginning because, in the beginning, it was probably, "Oh, I can get some cool skins for a weapon," and now it's sort of, "Okay, I can actually work towards something and try to show my stuff off and get a name out there as well as getting paid for it and getting people actually commenting, saying they like it." Things like that, you know. See, the only thing I've seen as an issue was, personally, and I've talked with you about this, Glenn, about how I have so many cool ideas that I sketched out and everything, but I can't model at all worth crap to be able to make my items and submit them to Workshop to see if people would like them. I came up with a couple of Left 4 Dead concepts and some for Dota 2, but again: Who can you work with out there that would like to help you make your item become a reality? On that note: If you happen to be out there and you are willing to work with John, feel free to leave us a comment down below in the comments section. That was a sly promotion from your friend John, but that's fine; you're welcome to do that. But, no, in all reality it’s the truth. It's also an honor system as well because you don't want to get gypped out of getting credit for the item that you've made either. I'll just say, guys, that I did lend John some money recently and he still hasn't paid me back, so be careful: he is a bit of a sly one. But yeah, from that perspective, we talk about trust and, this is something that falls into the workshop as well, I think Valve have taken it upon themselves; a lot of community content in the past has been hosted on third-party websites over the years. We've used Mod DB and things that this. PlanetPhillip's a good resource for single-player maps. But a lot of these Workshops they've put in place now take a lot of the third-parties out of the equation. Left 4 Dead maps--we were talking about before we started recording-- it seems Valve had some problems with them. They originally quite officially supported them, but I won't make an official comment on it here because I don't really understand the circumstances, but I think they had some problems where they wanted to make it an official stance where they were hosting the maps themselves, Valve, rather than having third-parties do so. I don't know if this is a community-killer from that side or just making it official has made it more accessible by people. Which way around is it? I would say, in a lot of things, it's simply becoming more accessible. One example... My only real experience with Workshop so far has been with Legend of Grimrock. They recently--after they released the full single-player game, they then made a patch that added a developer kit and really geared the game so that fans could essentially add content and value to the full purchase. Had Workshop not existed, I would have to go through something like Nexus, which hosts stuff for Oblivion and Skyrim and all of that, or I would have had to go to just their forums and download everything individually and install everything and... I've been doing that ever since Half-Life, but it's still a pain. It's still frustrating in all these layers. Now I can go through--with, like, Legend of Grimrock--and just be like, "Okay, I want this one, this one, this one, this one, this one," and then I can wait for them to download, jump into the game, and just try them out right then and there. James, did you know it had Workshop before you bought the game or did you buy it knowing that? I bought it before it had Workshop. Right, so it didn't influence your decision in purchasing it. Right. I will say that, had I been more on the fence about it, I definitely would have bought it because of Workshop. I personally feel that Workshop really works best at adding value to single-player games. I am not the kind of person that cares about cosmetic items. There are plenty of people who do, and that's a completely stylistic choice. It has no appeal to me at all. I don't care about a hat that makes me look different or special. I don't care about anything that makes me look different or special. All I care about is being able to play what I want to play and hopefully play it well. With Legend of Grimrock, it's an entirely new single-player experience, sometimes really good, sometimes really bad, but you at least are given the opportunity to try out something new and without a lot of real effort into doing so. Conversely to that, you do have some items which are cosmetic in the sense that, in Dota 2, like announcer packs and other additional things like banners they have in the game. And although they are, to a degree, not giving you any new content in terms of maps and things like that, it does improve or change the game experience to some degree, I think. We all have some items here in Dota 2, don't we? John, do you have some announcer packs? I don't have any announcer packs right at this time. Would you buy one? Would you like custom ones--things like that? Does that appeal to you? I think it depends on the cost and how much someone's willing to pay for it. Some of us, like me, are poor and can't buy stuff from the Shop. The thing is, is that I just like having access to so much more content. We've been following Valve for so many years and they've never been able to churn content out at this level before, but having these third-party people coming in to do so... I mean, we're looking at this, we look at a lot of the companies involved in outsourcing Valve games in the past since the Orange Box and Left 4 Dead 2, Hidden Path were involved in the game art, Turtle Rock Studios did some of the DLC. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was heavily outsourced. Hidden Path did a lot of the game design, Art Bully did some of the character models, LakshyaDigital was a company based in India that did some of the game art and Liquid Development as well. These are all companies that we've seen working outsourced games by Valve to work on the assets, just because Valve don't have the manpower to do a lot of this extra work. They've got so many people working on so many different things that, by having Workshop supplement their development, it means you're getting so much more from them that we used to. It's like, if you remember back, Valve always used to do and still do free DLC, which is something very few other companies have actually touched. If you look at the Workshop in that light, all it is is an extension of that where it is outsourcing like you said, Glenn, but it's kind of optional DLC. You're not paying anything for Left 4 Dead maps or Skyrim campaigns or whatever else, but it's totally free content that... They set up the Hub, but apart from that, they've not really doing any of the work on it, and yet it enhances the players' experience, as you said before, which acts as incentive to maybe buy or play again. But do you think, as the same time, that takes away people's... "Well Valve didn't do this; do I really want to play it?" Some people are like, "Oh, the campaign's made by Valve, so it must be really, really good." It depends. If something has risen to the top of the Workshop, like a Left 4 Dead 2 campaign or a new skin or whatever else, I think that's enough incentive for somebody to go, "Okay, this has x number of likes; it must be quite good. I'll try it out." That's the incentive, more so than, "Well Valve haven't touched it, so therefore I'm not going to touch it." There is still some problem with exposure in Workshop. The Up and Down system does work a degree, but there is some content which I think is being lost. It's difficult to rise to the top. Some people have got really good perspectives on it. A lady who used to be on HalfLife2.net and ValveTime, who did the Saharan Spy Pack for TF2, and now she's done so many extra other things for Dota 2 as well and she was recently interviewed on PC Gamer. She's doing really well, she's got a job in the industry now, having made quite a lot of money. I think she's got quite a high platform now, in which, when she adds extra items to the Workshop, it floats pretty much straight to the top. In the Polycount contest she had a lot of visibility, but there are some people that-- I know a couple of people who have been working on items that have only gotten a couple of likes. Some of their items and ideas are excellent. It's just difficult to get some of that visibility. Although, James, what you were saying at the start, there's less barriers and there's a bit more visibility, there's still problems with the system. Oh yeah, there's always going to be that issue with how being popular allows you to be popular. Sometimes it's really important to be first more than it is to be good. Get those comments in quick, people! Yeah. I feel like that's a bit of a turnoff because I do feel like, when you democratize too much, you really do begin to lose the diamonds in the rough. There are still a lot of circumstances where-- there's kind of a long-running joke where you can add *** to everything in an Elder Scrolls game, including mud crabs, and those are the things that will be popular. So, with Dota 2, what if all of the popular things are suddenly these incredibly sexualized characters or skins? I feel like that would be negative and it would still very likely become very, very well-rated and popular. Yeah, but that's like anything in life, though: If you put *** to it, it's going to get popular really, really quickly. John, that's the thumbnail for this episode. Oh god... Well, changing the subject for a minute, going back to CS:GO getting their Workshop, it's going to be interesting to see how that will pan out. When you play CS: Source, the server has to host the map and all that and you actually see what you're downloading. As it stands right now, though, if you're downloading a custom map from a server, you don't know what you're downloading at all. It doesn't tell you anything, so I'm wondering how they're going to set that up with Workshop. If the server is running a custom Workshop map, is it somehow going to show that image while you're downloading it from Workshop while you're still in-game? Ask permission or something like that? Yeah, so it's going to be interesting to see how that pans out. But that's something that's always happened; that's no different from how it's been for literally over a decade: You hop on a server. If you don't have the map, you download it and then you start playing it-- you don't know anything about it before, so I don't really see that as a negative thing. The only thing I see is that, right now, you don’t know what you're downloading. In old terms, you'd actually see the file name when you're downloading and say, "This is map "so-and-so" or "Fight Your Winner" or whatever." Yeah, you would have the map name, that's true, but are you saying you don't have the map name anymore? No, when you download something custom in CS:GO, it's just a loading bar; it doesn't tell you anything. But that's because there's no Workshop support right now, so it may be different. Yeah, they might add something. I mean, Garry's Mod had something, right, Nick? You've been playing Garry's Mod for a decade. They have a custom system that shows you the maps you're downloading and all the files that are coming in. Yeah, GMod still uses the old CS: Source system, where it shows it on the gray bar down at the bottom, which newer Source games don't use because they've scrapped the whole "everything looks the same" model. CS:GO might have something like that, it might get something with Workshop, so if anyone's in the Workshop beta, they can probably let us know, but I think they do need to add something like that because, if what John's saying is true, it could be an easy way for server hosts to get anything on your computer without you knowing. Are there any other topics? Because I have a really good ending question which would be good for everybody. What's your final thought for the day? What Workshops do you want to see still become a reality? Alien Swarm. Alien Swarm would be good. It would be really good. It's the one thing they said that game should have. They were talking about how the tile editor would make it a lot easier... for that game, but no one really plays it, so is there any incentive? Is there any reason? I mean, they're porting Half-Life and Counter-Strike to Linux at the moment; they'd obviously rather go back to games like that than support Alien Swarm anymore. You say that, but Alien Swarm never cost anything to begin with, so the only incentive would be that the whole "games as a service" thing that Gabe has been talking about for years. That would be the only thing, I would say. It was probably more of a rhetorical question at the moment. I wasn't literally answering, but I think we're throwing it out there to you guys to tell us what you'd like to see. Two things I want to see happen is a Fallout: New Vegas Workshop and a Source Filmmaker Resource Workshop. I like the second one a lot; that sounds like a really good idea. Yeah, that sounds like something that would get used a lot. There are so many awesome models that people have made just for Source Filmmaker and it's just hard trying to locate and download them, and I think if they have a Workshop, everyone can just put all their content there. I think each week on Dota 2 as well, they add assets which are used just for Source Filmmaker. Yeah, they added some last week--some trees and things like that. So they're consciously having to do that, so it seems to be picking up speed, so that's a very good call, John. I think that maybe something which would be in the pipeline. Hopefully we'll see that in the near future, but Counter-Strike: GO is the next one, so it might be out by the time you guys listen to this, or perhaps not. But if anyone has access to it, let us know if we've said something that isn't quite correct about how it's going to be set up or what it's going to be like. That's pretty much everything from us for this episode. We'll be back perhaps in another two weeks' time to discuss our next topic. If you've got any tips or anything you want us to talk about, leave them in the comments, let us know. And if you want to help me with any modeling projects, please let us know. ...only if you put *** in the thumbnail. What's your e-mail, John? Just throw it out there. It's john... I wouldn't. "johnwantsyoutoworkforfree@gmail.com," okay? Yeah, okay, yeah, right, yeah... Alright, guys, we'll see you next time. Thanks for listening. Have a good one. -Bye. -Bye. -Bye.