Day 17: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly: Part 2

Yesterday I talked about the bad publishers so today I'll talk about the good one. Business-wise, these are some of Buddy Christ's personal favorites.

ZeniMax:

ZeniMax is fairly modest compared to its competitors. It was founded in 1999 as a publishing vehicle for Bethesda Softworks, famous for the Elder Scrolls series. Since then ZeniMax bought the ailing Fallout franchise in 2004 and then id Software in 2009. Last year they acquired a few more, lower profile independent developers as well.That's pretty much all the expanding they've done so far. So why are they so great? They don't release games very often but the ones they release are usually phenomenal. The Elder Scrolls series, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, and recently WET, Brink and Hunted: The Demon's Forge. While some of those titles are less than stellar the core of ZeniMax is rarely matched. ZeniMax is in the business of making great games rather than making good ones. They're not following all the latest trends that are generating more profit while short changing customers. Nowadays, publishers often release DLC for games on Day One, which of course means it's either cheap or forcibly cut from the original game. Bethesda released Fallout 3 and then released five expansions over the next year that blew everyone else out of the water. They did DLC the way it was meant to be done and still no one has the guts to do it quite like them. With a new Elder Scrolls game, Rage from id and whatever else they have cooking up after that ZeniMax is hard to ignore and they're only going to get better and more powerful as they expand.

Take-Two:

Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. is a fairly young publisher as well, founded in 1993, but with a gigantic portfolio. I'd say for every game you look to buy there's a good 1:3 chance that it's a Take-Two game not including Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft's published games. Take-Two is similar to ZeniMax in that they release incredible games that push the medium to new limits. However, Take-Two is no stranger to releasing its share of cash in titles. Mostly, Take-Two is on the list because they produce some of the most significant franchises in the industry today: BioShock, Borderlands (and all of Gearbox's products), Grand Theft Auto (and all of Rockstar's products including LA Noire and Red Dead Redemption). They also have a slew of sports titles which are the only significant competition to EA's line of sports titles. I don't know the numbers but I'd wager they're a lot less successful and for the most part are being abandoned because of it. Sad news here is that Take-Two is constantly surrounded by buyout and merger rumors in recent years. They could have taken the route say Activision would have in this case and release a new Grand Theft Auto and BioShock game every year...but they don't. They exercise restraint and that's why I'm cheering for them to remain independent of the evil publishers trying to buy them out.

Valve:

Valve was formed in 1996 by Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington. They were high level Microsoft employees when Windows was exploding in popularity. They made enough dinero to retire right then and there but they had a stupid idea. What if we took all our money and tried to build a kick ass video game instead? So they did. They founded Valve, hired a bunch of people and built Half-Life, unanimously considered one of the greatest shooters if not greatest games of all time. Then they started working on mods for the Half-Life engine including Team Fortress and Counter-Strike. They built their own software engine, Source, and made a sequel, Half-Life 2. Valve also built their own software client, Steam, that let them patch games and host online multiplayer servers in real time. By this point Valve had grown strong enough to publish their own games. The Steam client turned into a store which started as a stage for Valve to sell their games digitally but blossomed into a full fledged store full of games from many publishers. Steam has been around longer than Xbox Live Arcade or the PlayStation Network Store and is essentially the blueprint for both.

But what does Valve do for me? Since Valve publishes PC games digitally they would offer ridiculously low prices from time to time...now they do it every single day and even more during holidays and special occasions. Valve supports their games with patches and DLC packages just like everyone else does nowadays...but Valve does it for free. Valve has their Source SDK available for anyone to use for free. Thanks to Garry's Mod, an interface mod for the SDK, an entire genre of YouTube media has been created. Valve makes comics and movies to promote and expand their franchises with and again it's all free. Probably the best of all though is Valve has found a method of DRM that placates PC developers' fears of piracy while still being infinitely more flexible and customer friendly than anything else on the market. DRM used to be a necessary evil but now it's anything but evil. Valve doesn't release games very often because they keep busy with managing Steam, adding free content and patches to their games and experimenting with new technology. However, whenever they do release a game it's usually flawless. While most publishers want to build a customer base Valve wants to build a community trust and expect them to keep Valve afloat. They're like an indie rock band who works hard, plays for beer and gives away their albums at shows. Except it worked, that indie rock band now controls the majority of the PC gaming market and they're still expanding rapidly. Before Valve was just awesome, now they're awesome and dangerous because no one is in the position to compete with them, feature for feature, and remain profitable.