Publicado originalmente por GabeN:

Hi I'm Gabe Newell and this is the foreword for a developer walkthrough on how to create a player environment suitable for no one, to push the players away from the game so you can instead force the people below you in our alleged "hierarchy-less" company here at Valve, to work on either a boring VR project no one will be interested by, or an update for one of our two cash-cow games popular among Russians and Chinese who are an untapped market, with only recent exposure to video games and the internet, and haven't quite yet developed a taste. I hope you enjoy this guide and that it brings you success in chasing easy money.

So, you have a game from several years ago people won't drop, yet you want to move on with your life and just whip up a new VR trinket or bad card game every now and then to make sure your paycheck keeps coming in. Well, the first step to killing off any franchise is making sure you don't ever update it, and just actively ignore it.

A prime example of a way of doing this here at Valve corporation would be our desperate push to make everyone play Dota 2, which has received more updates in the past 3 months, at a whopping 26 updates the average TF2 fan could only dream of receiving, one adding an entirely new Hero.

Whilst TF2 on the other hand has received only 25 updates since the beginning of 2018, at a timespan of 1 year and 3 months, of which none have added any real content other than player made Steam workshop cosmetics, with the only gameplay differences being a few buffs and nerfs here and there in the Blue Moon pack, an entire year ago now.

As you can see, this is a very good way to try and get players to move on to our other F2P game that makes us a lot more money and has an entire country with a population that is roughly 20% of the earth population as an already guaranteed playerbase.

Now, like all games made before 2013, there will always be that group of players, usually redditors or /v/ users who for some reason won't move on to your latest fad for silly arbitrary reasons such as "fun" or "good gameplay."

Instead of just ignoring these people and leaving them to their own devices but only on community servers, like EA with old Battlefield games, we here at Valve take a different approach, instead making community servers as hard as possible to exist. A good way to accomplish this is by having the first option available be for our Casual gamemode, formerly quickplay, which was just as bad if not a bit better.

This combined with a server browser from the year 2000, originating from a game likely older than the majority of our playerbase of Eastern European children who pick this game up for a few hours when they make an account as it's free, AND a completely ignorant approach to community servers, never shining the spotlight on them or what they do, or the freedom of custom maps, will guarantee your games community servers die off in no time, forcing most players to stick to our matchmaking. Which takes us on to our next point...

Now, if you've been following American politics fervently, like us Seattle hipsters. You'll know a great way to achieve what you want is to divide people in to camps, and at least attempt to appeal to them. So to achieve this, we introduced a matchmaking update in mid-2016. Now this at the time split the game in to two groups, those who supported it and watched armchair intellectual youtubers like Uncle Dane who call for every single fun unique thing ever to be removed and all weapons to be nerfed in to hell, and those who had been playing the game for more than 3 years and weren't addicted to watching Twitch streamers.

Not only did we divide this way, more importantly, we divided playerbases by what maps they want to play. Originally with quickplay we had 6 CTF maps in the rotation, with it going through each map and letting the player try each map individually. Thankfully, we now have reduced this down to two, 2fort and Turbine, with some maps like Well and Landfall being entirely forgotten and memory holed. With this developer writing this personally only having played the latter map on a community server when it was a custom map, when we were getting analysis and statistics on how to make sure people never went on such sordid places again.

By doing things like this you will successfully split players up, leaving them to encounter the same enemy's and teammates again and again now they have such choice, which will eventually cause them to feel like the game must be dead or dying with a lower playerbase than it really does, akin to the broken window theory.[en.wikipedia.org]

Now, you might be thinking at this point, "But you've just made it easier for players to play what they want, how is this meant to free me from a franchise I worked on a decade ago and want nothing to do with anymore?"

Well, here's how, this paragraphs apt title should clue you in a bit, disregard. Disregard what? Cheaters, of course!

If you go on the TF2 steam forums and reddit every now and then to chuckle to yourself as you count your money and sip on some orphan-blood infused caviar champagne like me, you'll no doubt have noticed lots of complaints about cheaters on our former game.


Things such as the image above, known spinbot snipers that enter the server, ruin it for a few minutes, are unkickable due to our great new party system we introduced with meet your match, and will certainly kick you if you kill them or attempt to kick them, are a GREAT way to put players off sticking around. They have 6 of them join, and the best bit is, they join both teams! No player is spared! We don't know who came up with this but when I informed the CEO about this when I asked him to write the foreword for this guide, he just gave me a big knowing wink, before telling me to "run along" and patting me on the back as he pushed me out the door of his walk in refrigerator office.



Another great way to put players off is allow some weird creepy brony to run amok DDoSing servers as he pleases, honestly, it saves us a lot of work anyway, if he ends up damaging a server and it no longer works, we save money! Our contract to replace them expired years ago so we've been letting this guy do this for months! Take that EA, bet you wish you'd made IP addresses to servers really vulnerable and not developed security so you wouldn't have to keep up at least some servers for Bad Company 2. I kid I kid, my cousin works at EA, great guy, introduced microtransactions to Star Wars Battlefront after I gave him the idea from our TF2 Mann Co Crate hustle.

Now if you have followed these 4 steps, provided you make sure to never make any public statement about any of this ever and try to pretend the game never even happened, and make sure to never make any appearance at E3 or GDC unless it's to show off a Portal themed VR "minigame."

Then you've done it. You have freed yourself from the shackles of your past and can now move on to office pizza parties, Dota 2 updates, and avoiding the watchful eye of your secretly not so secret higher ups.

P.s. Gabe wanted me to pitch this new company motto to you guys about money and stuff, but then I realised we don't use mottos as we never appear at any conventions or conferences, so whatever. I'm probably fired now anyway