During this week’s 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:State of Play, a game that looked an awful lot like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Half-Life: Alyx got shown off. It wasn’t Half-Life: Alyx — it was a new VR game from Deep Silver, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Metro Awakening. Like Half-Life: Alyx, it’s a big, triple-A, story-focused VR FPS set in a post-apocalyptic world that’s a prequel to an iconic FPS series. I didn’t actually mistake this game for Half-Life: Alyx — Valve’s VR prequel is burned into my brain — but it immediately got me thinking: why isn’t Alyx ⛎available anywhere other than Steam yet?
The answer to this question might seem simplistic at first. Valve, like Nintendo, Sony, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Microsoft, is a platform holder as much as it is a developer. Nintendo doesn’t just want to sell games, it wants to sell consoles for you to play those games on, controllers to play them with, chargers to keep your console running, and peripherals to enhance the experience. Valve, similarly, wants you to stay in its ecosystem. It wants you to use Steam to play your games and use Steam to buy more games. And it manufactures hardware, like the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Steam Deck and the Index, that you can use to play those games, which it also se꧑lls.
The thing is, though, Steam doesn’t really operate that way in practice. The Steam Deck, for example, can play games from 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Epic Games Store and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Xbox Game Pass with a bit of tinkering. It isn’t exclusively for playing Valve games. It’s a portable gaming PC, with most of the functionality that entails. The launch of Half-Life: Alyx was defined by a similarly ecumenical approach. You could play it with an Index — which Valve shipped me and other reviewers during the pre-release period so that we could have optimal experiences — but you could also use an 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Oculus Rift or a Vive, even an Oculus Quest if ꦗyou had a Link cable. I💖f you had a PC headset, it would probably work.
Given this all-are-welcome approach, it seemed natural that Valve would eventually port Half-Life: Alyx to PlayStation’s ecosystem. The time might not have been right for the first few years after Alyx’s release, given that Sony users were still using the PSVR headset that originated for the PS4. But, it’s been nearly a year since the launch of PSVR2 and over a year since it was announced in November of 2022. If Valve was interested in bringing the game over, its developers would have had their hands on dev kits long before that. With every State of Play that passes without the announcement that Half-Life: Alyx is coming to PS5🌌, I’m increasingly wondering, what&🐻rsquo;s the deal?
Valve's Orange Box Is Still The Greatest Deal In Gaming History
Three Half-Life games, Portal, and💯 Team Fortress 2 for one bargain price still hits different.
Though Valve skipped the PS4 generation, that had more to do with the company largely taking a break from single-player game development than any lapse in its relationship with Sony. It brought Half-Life and Half-Life 2 to the PS2 and PS3 respectively. Portal and Portal 2 were also available on PS3, and se🌠veral other Valve games came to the console through The Orange Box collection.
Maybe Valve moving into the hardware game has prevented it from expanding onto other companies’ platforms? The w🌃ork required to sell and maintain hardware may be eating up the bandwidth that ot🤡herwise could have been used to port its games to other consoles. But it seems like a lot of money to leave on the table. Half-Life: Alyx launching on PSVR2 would be a win-win for Valve and Sony.
It would require a comparatively small team to get the game running on the new hardware, and Alyx (which convinced a not insignificant amount of people to purchase thousand dollar headsets) would instantly be a killer app for PSVR2. It would be the biggest possible third-party game Sony could get on PSVR2, so I can't believe that Sony hasn't offered to back up a dump truck of money to Valve's Bellevue offices for a port. Maybe that's the problem. As a platform holder, Valve has more money than it could ever need, with Steam generating billions of dollars in revenue every year. What seems like a no-brainer to me (someone with no billions) may seem like a hassle to Valve (a company with several billions).
Sony Is Making The Same Mistakes W🐬ith The PSVR2 That It Made ෴With The PS Vita
Th💫e PSVR2, like the Vita before it, is💮 an incredible piece of hardware that's in desperate need of games.
