From the opinion piece:
Last year, I pointed out how many big publishers came crawlin’ back to Steam after trying their own things: EA, Activision, Microsoft. This year, for the first time ever, two Blizzard games released on Steam: Overwatch and Diablo 4.
Epic bought rocket league and promptly tanked it in favor of their stupid fortniteverse. Maybe steam keeps winning because they’re not actively screwing over their customers.
Or Pheonix Point, where Epic bought an kickstarter game that was funded under the promise of releasing on Steam, GOG and potentially other stores and promptly made it exclusive - and this was in the early days when their launcher/store was in a much worse state too.
There must be more to success than that, because Valve likewise bought Campo Santo, the developer of Firewatch, and now their next game is all but canceled. These companies can’t help but focus on their big money makers at the expense of all else.
All I can find about their next game is called “In the Valley of Gods” which looks like it is still being developed. What game was cancelled? Also how is that the same as buying an IP then running it into the ground so their main IP can get a mildly popular game mode that will likely be forgotten about in a couple months? I’m already bored of rocket racing and I only installed it because a friend kept begging me to play fortnite zero build which I also don’t enjoy.
Sadly Valve is guilty of a similar thing. Valve bought Campo Santo and (at least that’s the public statement) the developers were free to work on whatever projects and chose HL Alyx instead of that new game after Firewatch. Game development gets cancelled all the time and perhaps the new game just wasn’t that good.