Double Fine and Valve

Tonight, it’s Valve versus Double Fine. Are you ready to find out which is the better studio!?

If so, you’ve come to the wrong place. Just because the Internet is filled with stupid articles like “Which video game character has the best cleavage?” or “Our Top 10 top-10-lists List” doesn’t mean I shouldn’t worry about quality control. If you’re interested in comparing apples to oranges, I suggest you try bartering at a local farmer’s market.

This past year, I’ve been following the release/development of various new video game IPs that…“interest” me. Some of are the IPs seem awesome, other IPs, not so much, so I began looking into the development of these new IPs and how the studios develop them. I thought it’d be interesting to compare the studios’ different creative processes and creative outputs, and see what I can learn from the exercise. I’m looking at Double Fine and Valve specifically because:

1)   They’re pretty open how they get their ideas and develop them.

2)   Both companies are financially successful and creative juggernauts that try to own their own IPs, yet they develop their sequels/original IPs very differently.

3)   They produce games in so many tones and genres that it is next to impossible to predict what kind of game they will be developing next.

4)   I’m in lesbians with both of these studios.

Valve Corporation is a video game developer located in Bellevue, Washington. Valve seems to get the majority of its ideas from their 100% time initiative and from the young game development community. Google has something called “20% time,” where employees spend 80% of their work time working on their assignments, but the remaining 20% time is spent working on whatever they feel will make the company better. A lot of Google’s ideas came from 20% time, like Gmail and Google News. Valve took the radical concept of 20% time and quintupled it. At Valve, you aren’t given any assignment to work on, as the company doesn’t really have any formal vertical hierarchy. You decide what your time is best spent working on to help the company/product be the best it can be. This can mean being a modeler on a project instead of a network programmer, it can mean working with other people to add a feature to an already released game, or it can mean convincing people in the company to make a new product with you.

Another big source of ideas for Valve comes from the young game development community. I write “young” because Valve isn’t looking at normal studios like Irrational or Naughty Dog, but rather Valve is looking at the modding community and student developers. Quite a few of Valve’s hit products had mod origins: Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Alien Swarm, and Dota 2. Valve sees good ideas and passionate, talented teams, hires the team, and gives them more resources to expand the original concept. Valve also looks very carefully at student games. At a Digi-Pen student showcase, Valve saw a student project called “Narbacular Drop,” a 3D puzzle game where you control a fairy that can create 2 portals and travel through them to complete objectives. Valve was impressed, invited the students to Valve HQ to present their game, and, halfway through the presentation, Gabe Newell, the managing director of Valve, hired them. The team, along with a few other Valve employees, created Portal. Another student project, called Tag: The Power of Paint, a first person puzzle game where different colored paint gave the player different ways to explore and solve puzzles, also impressed Valve, and they hired part of the team and integrated some of their ideas into Portal 2 in the form of gels.

Double Fine Productions is a video game developer located in San Francisco, California. Unlike Valve, Double Fine has various ways of developing their games. Originally, Double Fine made big retail games that were designed top-down. They were Tim Schafer’s dreams realized by his development team. They worked this way to produce Psychonauts, a psychedelic platformer, and Brütal Legend, a heavy metal-inspired open world action game with RTS elements. Twice during the long development of Brütal Legend, Double Fine had Amnesia Fortnight game jams. For these Amnesia Fortnights, the company would forget what they were doing for two weeks, people would pitch their ideas to Tim Schafer, the CEO and Creative Director of Double Fine, he would pick the four best ones, and the big Brütal Legend team would break down into four smaller teams and make those smaller games. Originally, it was just an exercise to recharge their creative batteries, but the Amnesia Fortnight games would go on to save the company.

Double Fine’s deal for Brütal Legend 2 fell through, and with nothing else available, Tim Schafer selected the four best AF prototypes and shopped them around to publishers, and the games were picked up in a matter of weeks. Those prototypes eventually became Costume Quest, Stacking, Iron Brigade, and Sesame Street: Once Upon A Monster. With the help of an angel investor, Steve “Dracogen” Dengler, Double Fine was able to port the first three games to the PC and they were able to get the publishing rights to Psychonauts on the PC. Not only did Amnesia Fortnight keep Double Fine in business, it allowed them to expand. As Tim Schafer puts it, “we can try these things without totally committing ourentire company to it and putting all our bets on one thing. And then ifsomething works out, we can go grow that branch, or we can retreat and say thatwas a nice effort." Double Fine can now do more kinds of games and pursue different ways to make games, like trying out mobile games, free-to-play games, and funding through Kickstarter.

Double Fine was unable to find a publisher to back a point-and-click adventure game they wanted to make, so they attempted to find funding through Kickstarter. They were so successful, not only did they make over 8 times the amount of money they were looking for, Double Fine’s Kickstarter project actually broughtKickstarter a lot more backers to their site.

So what does all of this stuff mean? For starters, Double Fine and Valve (as far as I can tell from publically available information) are much more effective in turning things produced in their game jams into commercial products. Insomniac Games has held two idea jams, where employees gathered on the office roof and brainstormed a bunch of game ideas, which wound up becoming far too complicated for a game for them to make. In Ted Price’s words, “it was a complete waste of time.” In May 2011, Lionhead senior management allowed the developers two daysto make some tiny games. As of now, none of these games have been fleshed out and released as downloadable or retail games. Also, thatgamecompany have had afew 24-hour game jams, but while the team that made these games are very small and only had a small period of time to work, their games probably will not become their next game. Some other companies have had success with internal game jams, but only under certain conditions. Bethesda has annual game jams, but one year, management said that all of the game jam things produced had torelate back to Skyrim. Quite a few of the things in that game jam actually wound up being integrated into Skyrim, like Kinect shouting and being able to become a vampire. Media Molecule has done two game jams: the first one wasn’t very successful, but the second one was because management imposed a constraint of having a “paper world.” Tearaway came from that game jam.

Still, in terms of the number of things produced in game jams that end up making money, Double Fine and Valve are the best. Double Fine, with 2 Player Productions, actually produced documentary episodes chronicling this year’s Amnesia Fortnight and sold copies of the prototypes developed. Valve, I forgot to mention, that in addition to having 100% time, also had their own game jam called Directed Design Experiments back in November 2007, where Gabe Newell essentially shut down the company for five months and turned it into a creative playground. Some of the results of this experimental playground included AI that acted differently based on the players actions and environment that later went into the Left 4 Dead series and Portal 2, blob technology that also went into Portal 2, and a time manipulation game idea that, while deemed too complex, Kim Swift took the idea and made Quantum Conundrum with Airtight Games and Square Enix.

Comparing Double Fine and Valve, while Double Fine is an entertainment company that uses technology, Valve is a technology company that creates entertainment. Double Fine is a studio that is auteur driven, but also has a shared vision in the teams. If you read interviews/watch the Amnesia Fortnight interviews, the ideas came from the team lead and the other team members expanded that idea into a game. Valve is very effective add improving their existing product (ex. Portal 2 Perpetual Testing Initiative and Portal 2 as a teaching tool, Left 4 Dead DLC packs, and all the billion updates to Team Fortess 2) and very good at tech stuff (ex. Source 2, the Steam Box, Wearable Computing), but the company needs a direction in their high concept when creating games. Looking at their list of games (excluding Half-Life and Ricochet) that are neither sequels nor Source versions nor remakes, the ideas originated somewhere else: Team Fortress started off as a Quake mod, Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat were both 3^rd party mods of Half-Life, Portal’s main gameplay mechanic was originally a student project, Left 4 Dead was originally developed by Turtle Rock, Alien Swarm was an Unreal mod, and Dota was a Warcraft 3 mod. Valve hired/bought the developers and expanded the concept. I’m not sure if it’s because of Valve’s flat hierarchy where they can’t force someone to work on a project, or if it’s because they’re more inclined to tech/software than art, but it seems that if you want to successfully make a game at Valve, you need something that already exists, like a mod or a student game, that everyone can rally around and form opinions on, and then begin developing/acquiring talent from there.

Another big difference between Double Fine and Valve is that Double Fine is…um…fine designing all sorts of games, but Valve has a set philosophy for their games. For starters, Valve isn’t interested in traditionalsingle player games anymore. Gabe Newell has said “it’s not about giving up on single player at all, it’s like saying, we actually think that there’s a bunch of features and capabilities that we need to add into our single player games to recognize the socially connected gamer.” Gabe has also said that Valve movedpast an episodic model of games (Half-Life episodes 1 & 2) and now viewindividual games as a service. For example, under its belief of games as a service, Team Fortress 2 has received hundreds upon hundreds of updates. But this poses a question: can all games be services, or should it depend on the kind of game? Stacking is a wonderful game, but does it need more puzzles, and given its sales, could a studio like Double Fine even afford to make it a service? And how about Half-Life? It’s a story driven single player game. How do you make that a service and make it work for a “socially connected gamer”? Is it merely a case of making it a service if enough people want it, like whether or not a pilot should get a full season order, or will I have to enjoy my movies in the forms of HBO mini-series?

Oddly enough, I think Double Fine is the more pragmatic company of the two and Valve is a company that’s so successful that is stuck in the bubble. They’re a very smart and creative company, but look at Steam Greenlight, a service where the Steam community can vote which games can get on Steam: it’s a system where the majority votes for the lowest common denominator trash. Inside Valve, democracy works very well for them, but it only works for them because they’re filled brilliant and responsible developers, whereas the Internet is does not require you to be intelligent or self-managing to use.

Both studios are very different, and while Valve is much (much, much, much) more financially successful, both studios are booming in an environment where many studios are struggling to be financially stable, creatively challenged, and even own their own IP. Come back next month to see me compare the recent creative output of Blizzard to the creative output of that hobo I met in D.C. that talks to himself. The results might surprise you.