'We can make it if we try'
You know there are big moves going on within the world of PC gaming when Gabe Newell steps out of his suspended status pod in order to commune with the world and flaunt another step is his very vivid transition into 'Newell the White'. And with everything that's been going on recently, it's an absolute wonder why we're only hearing from him now. (No I- I'm not talking geopolitics.) It's no surprise why he's finally broken his peace now with recent industry events: We have the recent heavy consolidations that the AAA market is currently undergoing with Sony and Microsoft chucking around billions, the rise of NFTs and the depraved cloud they shroud the future of this pastime with, and then just the general failings of the global supply chain on this generation of consoles and PC parts. There's a lot of ground to cover and Gabe seems to want to try and hit it all before the twenty-three minute sand clock runs dry and it becomes time for Gabe to return to his Beach so that he can continue his endless search for Half Life 3.
When it comes to Gabe, I've never really had a serious opinion of the guy because the worlds of when he was active and when I was a PC gamer just never intersected. I made great use of the storefront he helped pioneer, so there's that, but I didn't experience that soaring age of "this is the guy that makes PC the best platform!" from those halcyon Half-Life and Team Fortress days. (I was even ludicrously late on the whole 'Portal' train) But after even just a snippet of hearing his views of NFTs and Crypto Currency integration into the gaming industry, I'm already starting to understand why this man was jokingly lauded as a deity for so long. And his opinions carry weight because, totally unbeknownst to me, Steam actually integrated with Bitcoin in April 2016 only to end up pulling those features in December 2017. That's well over a year of beta and experience to inform the views of the company, which is typically far more experience then those gibbering Gibbons over at Ubisoft have.
According to PC Gamer's interview with Gabe Newell, the decision to pull back was based on very real evidence that this was not a technology which benefited the industry. Newell recalls how "We had problems when we started excepting Cryptocurrency...50% of these transactions were fraudulent... these were customers we didn't want to have." How galling. For a payment method lauded for it's 'reliability' as well as it's anonymity, there really does seem to be a lot of corruption clinging to the Web 3 name. But Newell shares his understanding of these matters further into areas I'd never even consider; such as lamenting about the nightmare which was the Bitcoin market value, which is notoriously characterised for being jittery. In such an age there could be games that were once $10 going for $100, which turns gaming into a speculative investment market far from the medium of relaxing enjoyment all of this is meant to be part of.
But my favourite part of this little interview snippet is, rather narcissistically, the point at which Gabe Newell backs up what I've been saying about these NFT and Crypto integration early adopters all along. "There's a lot of really interesting technology in Blockchains and figuring out how to do a distributed ledger" Gabe posits, casually throwing out a term I've never heard of in my life and dread to look up. "I think people haven't figured out why you actually need a distributed ledger." Thank you! These people are totally clueless about the technology they're working with and yet still gallivant around pretending they alone stand at the forefront of modern advancement. They're toddlers playing with particle accelerators, and we're treated as the backwards idiots for trying to establish some sensible limits. He continues "There's a difference between what it should be and what it really is... NFT stuff: so much of it was ripping customers off...that's not what we want to do, we don't want to enable screwing large numbers of our customers over" What a heartfelt and honest sounding take on this whole situation, almost as though it's not driven by greed and lust for market share, but an actual desire to foster positive growth in the industry. I don't know if I've ever gotten that impression from a major player in gaming before. It's a nice reaction to have.
Gabe also touched on these stupidly huge purchases that have rocked the world over the past few years when it comes to unwieldy studio consolidations, and again his insight was invaluable and interesting. He spoke about his own experiences with propositions to 'consolidate' and 'synergise', and how the guiding force behind these choices can be "Really strange" as he puts it. He claims that there have been many "waves of this" sort of market movement over the years and he predicts "some of these acquisitions will get unwound. And some of them will turn out to be successful." To Newell the struggle seems to be in deciding which of these acquisitions were sought out because they would be "Additive" to both parties, and which could be classified as "Empire building", in his words. Some of these decisions are the latter in his experience, and those are the types of business decisions that, he reports, don't seem to last long. Again, truly insightful stuff from someone who is actually a president of a lumbering gaming industry titan himself.
Another topic of discussion was that most annoying of buzzwords, the Metaverse. It's always the Metaverse, isn't it? As though some 'Ready Player One' Megacorporation is going to drop us all into The Oasis overnight without our permission anyday now and we've all got to get ready for it. In truth there's is no more salient an example for modern techno-jargon buzzword gibberish than the phrase 'The Metaverse'. It's a term specifically designed to invoke imagery of omnipresent Matrix-like digital world spaces where everyone is an avatar; a total conversion of the world's running to proxy servers and game-like activities, one, true ultimate hub for social interaction. And the truth is that it's all just a marketing term to justify universal brand integration within pre-existing company boundaries. There's no one 'Metaverse', no brave new ground being broken with this technology, and in large part those that support the ideals of Metaverse are driven solely by their own abstract perceptive of what this should be rather than what it really is. Which is to say; a lot of them are delusional.
Gabe seems to agree. "Most of the people who are talking about metaverse have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. And they've apparently never played an MMO. They're like, 'Oh, you'll have this customizable avatar.' And it's like, well... go into La Noscea in Final Fantasy 14 and tell me that this isn't a solved problem from a decade ago, not some fabulous thing that you're, you know, inventing." I didn't even want to paraphrase that quote, or integrate it into the point that I'm making in that way which would make my Secondary School English teacher bounce with excitement. I happen to think that a lot of these supporters are genuinely clueless wave riders colourised by a few prominent shysters trying to grift a small fortune for themselves, whilst Newell seems to imply the ratio ekes in the other direction; but at least we reach a consensus that none of this hype is going to last and this 'Metaverse' terminology is going to blow away leaving the same cultural mark us on all that Fidget Spinners had. Just another cringe-part of recent societal history that we'll all hide our heads and try to forget we ever got excited and called it 'the future'.
Wrapped in such a tangle of thorny nonsense, it's comforting to hear an intelligent industry mainstay like Newell break everything about the current gaming industry down, calmly categorise it, and affirm that we'll get past it together. Like a parent who can key into your most vulnerable moments and say exactly the right thing to patch your shattered peace of mind back together, Newell serves as a fire douser. (At least, I assume parents can do that. I've never experienced it myself and thus have had to instead fashion the ability to hyperventilate until I pass out. It's very useful in practise!) I still hold misgivings that NFTs are going to stick around our more nefarious industry elements, like Ubisoft and Activision, but to hear that the larger industry is going to one day get over itself and return to improving the craft, however that looks in the future, is a warm cloud to rest on. So thank you for your insight, Gabe, it's actually nice to hear from you. Now quick, get back into your simulated environment pod before the Time Wraiths realise you've re-entered the timeline! GO!
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