Gabe Newell, founder and managing director of Valve Software, sits atop the hill as one of videogaming's most popular and successful developers, and one that's responsible for what we regard as the finest first-person shooter series ever - Half-Life. At the recent Games Convention in Leipzig, we crept up on Gabe and bombarded him with a barrage of questions covering Half-Life 2, Steam, next-generation consoles and beyond. Read on to find out what he had to say...
When stacking Episode One, Episode Two and Three up against each other, do each have a different gameplay style? In Episode Two, for example, you have the open environments...
Gabe Newell: They are bringing new things forward on the technology side, the game design side and on the story side. Episode One was very much about Alyx - about having this companion in the world, and how she made the gameplay better for you. And she could be a proxy for emotional states, like she would say: "You should be scared now". It gave us a very useful tool on the story-telling side.
Episode Two is different: we're using that similar approach with the Vortigaunts this time, instead of Alyx. We didn't want to do Episode One again, because you can always go and play Episode One again.
And the G-Man plays a bigger role in Episode Two, doesn't he?
Gabe Newell: Yes. The overall progression of the three episodes is that the G-Man is losing control of you. In Half-Life he made you; in Half-Life 2, he used you for his own purposes, which are still mysterious to you; and now he's starting to lose control. At the same point that he's losing control, you've come to the attention of other forces - the Combine hierarchy is now saying, "We thought that Earth was under our thumb, and this one person is being such a pain in the ass for us. So we're going to have to pay more attention to this person." So, although you have more freedom from the G-Man, other forces will come to bear on you.
So you know what is going to happen in episode three?
Gabe Newell: Yes, we know what happens after this episode; there's a fairly large chronology. Things tend to vary more in the specific details of the minor characters, so as we're working through the issues in an episode, we discover stuff about the characters regarding what is and isn't working. For example, Dog is getting much more of a role than we had originally envisioned for him.
To what extent are you reacting to people saying whether they liked this vehicle and so on?
Gabe Newell: We have this overall plan where we sit down and say: "Where can we get the most bang for our buck - here are the technologies we need to develop within that road-map." Then we order it based on feasibility and risk. You want to have some things that are risky and some things that are predictable in each of the chunks. Then we map that against how the story needs to move forward. We still have lots of flexibility in the production - if, say, we need more exploration, more story-telling and less action. One of the things we did was the re-use of areas in Episode One: some people liked it and others didn't. So we've gone back and re-edited Episode One to reduce that.
What can you tell us about Portal?
Gabe Newell: Portal is sort of at that beginning stage, where it's showing a lot of potential and we're working through all the technology issues, such as: "Oh, how do sounds work through portals and so on?" We're used to using DSPs as a method of determining sound attenuation, but that doesn't work when you're putting holes in everything. And we're looking at gaming issues: we want to make sure we can teach people how to use these things - it's such a change from how people are used to thinking of the world working. You know, a cliff is no longer a barrier - it's kinetic energy that you haven't used yet. Is it something that people can pick up on? It's great for us to get that out there earlier and learn as much as possible from gamers about how it's going to be received.
Episode Two is the second in the trilogy - it has been about seven months since Episode One. Can we expect to see Episode Three come around slightly quicker?
Gabe Newell: It will probably be about the same distance between the two.
How is your foray into episodic gaming shaping up?
Gabe Newell: We decided we wanted to do three episodes, then sit down and see how that was received, what the pros and cons were. And to assess the impact it had on our development, as well as how it was received by gamers. We think that the industry is facing a sort of explosion in game budgets - we're at $20 million now and, following movies, we're going to be at $200 million in the not-too-distant future. That's driving everybody to become very conservative in their choices. Rather than building their intellectual property and their own worlds, they're going to license the next big action movie, ship day one with that and take advantage of the $60 million marketing budget. They don't want to be innovative on game design - they want to do exactly the same game design that worked before with prettier graphics. And I think that's kind of a dead end - it's a disaster for the games industry if that occurs. So, managing that is one of our challenges as an industry.
The solution that we're trying is to break things into smaller chunks and to do them more regularly. So far, it seems to be working. When we look at how long it took us to build a minute of gameplay for Half-Life 2, versus how many man-months it takes us to build a minute of gameplay for Episode One or Episode Two, we seem to be about four times as productive. But we'll go through all three episodes to see... We sort of made a commitment to do it three times and then assess.
And you always said that you could plug new things into the engine as you went along...
Gabe Newell: You saw that in Episode One with the new lighting, and in Episode Two, you can see it in the cinematic physics - the wide-open areas forced us to solve problems of performance with those battleground kind of areas, with the particle systems. We're about an order of magnitude faster at drawing the kinds of smoke and weapon effects that show up when you have lots of Striders running around with lots of Combine forces.
Can that be retrofitted to, say Episode One?
Gabe Newell: Yes. We definitely think that content needs to move forward. For example, one of the things we're reacting to is the speed at which microprocessors are coming out. So, Intel has very aggressively moved up delivery of desktop processors with four different cores; we'll have support for that in Episode Two, and we'll definitely go back to affect, you know, Episode One or Half-Life 2 or Counter-Strike Source, so they can take advantage of that. We'll definitely try to keep the existing games - especially the multiplayer games - current as technology evolves.
Some new companies, such as PopCap, have committed to Steam. What plans do you have for Steam?
Gabe Newell: The way we think of it is that we need to continue to make Steam more useful to other game developers and to customers. For an example of that on the customer side, we want to improve performance. The engineers said: "Rather than guessing what's bottlenecking performance, let's go and measure what's actually going on." We instrumented all the Steam clients, and the answer was surprising. We thought that we should go and build a deferred level-loader, so that levels would swap in. It turned out that the real issue was that gamers' hard drives were really fragmented, and all of the technology we wanted wouldn't have made a difference, as we were spending all our time waiting on the disk-heads spinning round. So we put something in Steam that automatically detects and defragments people's hard drives.
Does it tell people what it's doing?
Gabe Newell: Yes it does - it'll pop up a message saying: "Your hard drive is really fragmented, we're going to go out and fix it unless you say don't". For other developers, I think there's a perception that these emerging systems are only good for selling people bits. I think that's the least useful thing that we'll be able to do. For example, we've been able to gather a lot of statistics from Episode One, about which weapons people use, and which ones they don't use, where they're getting stuck in the game, how far they have progressed and where they are dying. In some cases it has been what we would expect, but in other cases there have been surprises. So, not only is it helping us sell the games, it is going to help us make the games better. That's where anything that helps us close that loop with customers - not thinking of them as the other end of a warehouse full of boxes, but instead thinking of them as a huge, distributed computer platform. That's going to be helpful.
What is the split between sales of Episode One via Steam and boxed sales?
Gabe Newell: That isn't something that we've talked about. It's something we're keeping to ourselves.
So, how do you manage your relationship with EA when you're selling games via Steam?
Gabe Newell: Our relationship with EA is fine. I think that retailers are really frightened of these kinds of changes in the industry, and I think that we're learning stuff that is going to be very important for them. For example, Steam enables new ways of doing promotion: we've been doing these free weekends where people can play for a weekend and then the game shuts off. You can't do that with boxes - boxes sit in warehouses, you know, past the time, and you have no way of turning the box off. The interesting thing we found is that when we turned the game off, we generated a bunch of sales on Steam.
And we generated three times as many sales among people who had never played Day of Defeat before, who then went down to a store. So just as a promotional tool, it was way more effective than advertising. Even if you just view it as a way of driving people into stores to buy boxes, Steam is a better solution than these traditional approaches to marketing and sales. I think retailers are starting to understand that communicating more efficiently with customers is a way, not of taking money away from them, but of driving people into stores. It's not a way of cutting them out of the equation.
The thing that happened with Red Orchestra and Darwinia is that, once they were able to prove to people that they could be successful - in this case through a direct relationship over Steam - the retail success followed. Red Orchestra wasn't even getting a retail deal until after they could prove that there was an audience, and Darwinia's sales went up as a result of being on Steam.
What's your take on next-gen platforms? You've always been primarily a PC games company.
Gabe Newell: The PC is going to continue to be our primary focus. It gives us a lot of advantages as a development platform, and it also forces us to confront a bunch of issues, like for us it's very important to work well on older hardware and also take full advantage of new hardware. So the DX7 generation is much slower than the next-gen hardware, but DX10 is actually going to be more advanced than either the Xbox 360 or PS3.
For us, the Xbox 360 and the PS3 are challenges for designing a system so that it is as simple as possible for publishing simultaneously on all three platforms. The Wii is more of a challenge because of its input - that's something that we're going to have to work harder to understand. It's easier to think of the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 as things that live within the flexibility you already have to think of on the PC side. And the Wii is the thing that is both furthest outside and most exciting, because of the controller. I have to say that we don't understand how to take advantage of that yet. We think there's a lot of potential there, and our respect for Nintendo goes up a notch, as they're the ones who are doing the things that are disruptive and exciting.
Sony has always said that it is going to leave the ultimate control of its online service to developers and publishers. Could you envisage Steam and the PS3 Online Service merging in some way?
Gabe Newell: We'll certainly take advantage of whatever flexibility and openness they have, and if we can run our games through Steam, and get updates and new content to those customers, then that would be great. We'd encourage them to go in that direction, because we think the publishers and developers can do a really good job of figuring out how to deliver those services. That might be a key part of their strategy against Microsoft, because Microsoft wants to have that stuff very controlled through their systems.
It's nice that in general, those consoles that have lagged in their appreciation of the value of having the connected customer are starting to realise how important that is. Obviously, given our history, going back to the very beginning of the company, we've really believed that having that connected customer presents opportunities in game design, support and communications.
Right now, I think the benchmark game in the industry is World of Warcraft, and every platform could be measured against its ability to give advantage, or fail to give advantage, to building a better World of Warcraft. In the way that, in previous generations, it might have been a Grand Theft Auto or a Final Fantasy that was the benchmark. If your platform helps developers build something that beats that, then you're on the right track. If you're not offering that capability, then you're probably going to struggle.
How feasible is it for companies with less resources than Valve to build a game split into a number of episodes? Because you can't build part of a game and then release it.
Gabe Newell: I think that's one of the challenges. In the Quake era, one of the big challenges was working out how to build a 3D graphics engine. In Half-Life 2's era, one of the big challenges was scalability. One of the challenges now, for a developer, is managing risk: how can you build something that's useful and have only one roll of the dice, because most of the time, you're going to fail. I think building stuff that's smaller and managing to reduce the scope is one of the big challenges for game developers right now. It seems to work: I think the guys who built Darwinia could have made their job impossible, but they made some really good choices. Their art direction by itself made their art production workload enormously less, and those are the sort of smart choices people have to make.
How much nicer is it working with EA rather than Vivendi?
Gabe Newell: Well, EA hasn't sued us yet, so that's an improvement.
Have you got any comments to make on what happened with Vivendi, or would you rather not?
Gabe Newell: (Laughs) That was our old girlfriend... We've been very happy with EA, they're a very professional, very effective organisation. And nobody is suing anybody, so that's a vast improvement.
What is your take on in-game advertising?
Gabe Newell: I think it's interesting, and that people need to explore it. What it comes down to is that it's a monetisation issue. In Korea, for example, there are a bunch of games where the base game is given away for free, and you make money as a developer by allowing people to customise themselves. I think advertising is another way in which you can move away from trying to charge your customers. Hopefully, it's going to be a way of increasing the distribution of certain kinds of games, by reducing the direct cost to customers.
Could it ever be made to work in something as well-defined as the Half-Life universe?
Gabe Newell: The way we've designed the game, it would struggle if it had advertising intruding on it, because we weren't thinking about that when we were designing it. Obviously, any sports games are very well suited to having advertising.
1) Four times productive can mean that for the time they spent on a 5 hour gameplay game, they made four times the money. It does not necessarily mean they worked four times harder. Obviously if a 5 hour game is 1/4 of a 20 hour game that would be a saving right there, obviously! And if you can get £20 for that 1/4 of a game, meaning it would be £80 if it was a full game, you would be 4 times ahead, all things being equal!
2) Why is it a big secret how many were sold retail in boxes versus how many were downloaded? Unless of course 99.9% of sales were via retail and it would embarass Valve to admit Steam is not where the average gamer wants to get his games from. If it was the other way around why would Valve hide the numbers?
3) I don't see how episodic gaming does anything with regard allowing the freedom to do original games. That's as much about the media as anything, not about episodic gaming. Episodic gaming is mostly about being able to sneak a 60% increase into the cost of a full game! That more than anything will kill what's left of the PC games market, so Valve isn't as nice as they are trying to sound with regard caring about gamers.
No. Only when necessary. Unlike most people who are only positive - which somehow is seen as okay even if it is quite often the sort of positive 'head in the sand' type comment.
What makes being negative about a situation wrong? What makes you a good person because you choose to think the PC games market is not demising?
What makes you judge and jury That you decide the PC games market is okay. So de facto it must be okay without the slightest shadow of a doubt?
PC game sales are way down. Every Industry leader has said so in one form or another. On this site and others. I am far from alone, and yet you choose to have a attitude of how dare I disagree with you. I mean YOU for God's sake?! I know I am egotistical, but by God you are even more egotistical! So bricks and glass houses and all that!
(PS:I Have made comments recently that I like what am hearing from those same industry leaders saying the story is the thing and gameplay is the most important thing, etc. I have said words are easy and I will wait for the action, but if they put their money where their mouth is, there may yet be hope. It may be too late already, but hey, I want this market to survive, that's why I always point out where I believe a trend or actions are detrimental to that. Wherever I see it, whoever it is. After all, with PC games sales way down, doing the same thing can't possibly improve things; because it's been those very actions that have taken place over the past 2-3 years that have brought us to this low point in PC game sales.)
The point is that the entire games industry is being hit hard by falling sales, not just the PC. Either way it's a bit easy to start preaching the platforms demise when history has shown that argument to wholly miss founded on several previous occasions. The fact is that not only does the PC still have a large number of prominent developers/publishers creating games for it, but as a hugely extensible and accessible computer system the PC is never going to really die as a gaming platform purely because there will always be someone who's got a fun idea and the inclination to put it into code. Also, even with the tyranny of increasingly conservative industry money men you just have to look at the PC's thriving Mod and indy gaming community to see evidence of a strong beating heart.
Dogan, yes all formats are hurting, but Peter Molyneux didn't say a sole XBox version game couldn't make a profit, he said 'A PC only game couldn't make a profit any more'.
I think console gaming is going to suffer in the future because it seems to be following the PC model, but it is PC game sales down 60% in 3 years and suffering from bland, cloned titles of a narrower and narrower type. There is a little more variety in the console market. Not as much as in the past, but it is somewhat better than the PC market.
And anyway, I talk about the PC market because that's my hobby. I am a PC gamer, not a console gamer. I leave it to console gamers to tell their industry where they're going wrong and to try and save the situation if they think their hobby is in the decline.
You also take the head in the sand approach mentioned above. A market dies when it gets to small to be noticed or supported, it doesn't have to fall off the face of the Earth! You think a game publisher is going to publish if he is the only publisher left and there is a market of only a couple thousand gamers that will buy that game? Your argument is as long as there is one game publisher left the market isn't dead. Most economists would say that is exactly what a dead market is.
Well I just don't see the situation in the same light as you, and I have to say that I think Molyneux's statement is melodramatic at best. As I said in my previous post the big players may be getting ever more penny pinching in their outlook, but look lower down the chain and you won't find a more buoyant and varied selection of games creators on any other gaming platform. And with the introduction of development solutions like Microsoft’s XNA initiative (and more importantly the free ‘express’ version that will be available to anyone who wishes to use it) I can't see this changing.
Edit:
You also take the head in the sand approach mentioned above. A market dies when it gets to small to be noticed or supported, it doesn't have to fall off the face of the Earth! You think a game publisher is going to publish if he is the only publisher left and there is a market of only a couple thousand gamers that will buy that game? Your argument is as long as there is one game publisher left the market isn't dead. Most economists would say that is exactly what a dead market is.
I'm sorry but if my argument is 'burying my head in the sand’ then yours just smacks of paranoia.
Listen m8, I have been saying for over a year that PC gaming needs to change, the media, the publishers, even the hardcore gamers. In that time PC game sales are down over 30%
Would love to have seen you be willing to publically say 'PC gaming all okay' a year ago and then explain the sales drop. Also, even on this site, Industry leaders are saying the same thing, not just Peter. So how many will it take?
I have been saying for over a year that PC gaming needs to change
And it will, and it is (if a bit slower than some would like). However the reason why I feel confident on this issue is precisely for the reasons I've already touched on; while the big players do their merry dance and ‘realign their business models’ the wider world of PC enthusiasts are just getting on with making and playing great games, and they will be there waiting when the larger publishers finally manage to sort their houses out! The difference is that when publishers pull the plug on a console it does die because they don't have that core base of maker/hobbyists that the PC can boast to provide new content for them.
Would love to have seen you be willing to publically say 'PC gaming all okay' a year ago and then explain the sales drop.
But I don't need to, for exactly the reasons I've previously outlined.
The PC is a strong gaming platform and will out live this current trough.
You forget that gaming is a hobby. You may need to find the money for the rent, but you only want to play a game.
Even if you accept that many PC gamers of the 90's became console gamers, it does not change the fact that many many gamers have walked away from PC gaming and gaming in general in the last 5 years or so.
Specifically on the PC you must have a dynamic that allows for the average gamer to spend up to £1,000 on a new PC in the belief that the new PC will be utilized by the release of enough games that the person will want to play. This dynamic is now coming into play on consoles as they get much more expensive.
If this dynamic breaks down and the new PC/Console is not purchased, that is a done deal. It will take many quality game releases over a period of at least a year for that person to come back into the fold by buying a new PC/Console that will run these games.
I have bought two PC games this year. From all the releases that are being talked about I may buy 2 more. If I think that there are only going to be 4 or less PC games a year that I will want, would that justify a £1,000 spend on a new PC?
That question is being asked by more and more people, and based on a huge decline in both PC game sales AND home PC sales (about every PC manufacturer with maybe the exception of Dell is struggling - it's in the newspapers!) the answer seems to be that many gamers are deciding in the negative.
After all, the general trends seems to be either £20 five hour episodic games or £40 twelve hour gameplay games. Compared to just 2 or 3 years ago when games were seen as a 'rip off' if they had less than 30 hours of gameplay. (Just look at old gaming magazines!)
Even if you have a PC that is capable of playing these games, once you have bought and paid for 2 or 3 games over 3 or 4 months (for example) that you have finished each over a weekend because of the lack of gameplay, you find yourself with more time to do other things. These other forms of entertainment can then become the main interest, even retro gaming because you're getting your old games out more and more!
Everything I say is with the backdrop of the biggest decline in PC game sales in over 10 years, the slowest rate of home PC purchases in 8 years. That's why I know that something has to change. That having a few thousand modders working over and over on the same last games does not make a market. I am old enough to have seen the end of the Commodore 64 market in the early 90's. There were many more people in the media and industry and in general insisting the Commodore 64 was going to be around the following year and all would be well than there were people saying it was all over. Then one year it was over. The last Commodore 64 magazine closed it doors, the last publisher announced it would not be releasing any more C64 games and that was it. Now there were (and still are) people playing with their 64, buying old 64 games on ebay and helping re-generate a thriving retro hobby. But that is still a dead gaming system. Yes there are C64 websites out there and there are C64 emulators, but the market is dead.
That's what I mean by the PC gaming market dying. As a commercial, working industry with sellers and buyers and retailers and magazines and new releases all the time and all the other paraphernalia of a thriving industry/hobby.
Of course only a small percentage of people buy a PC with gaming at the top of there purchasing decisions list, so that’s not really the issue here. That still means though that although there is a large percentage of the installed user base that can’t play the crème de la crème, state of the art, ‘just laid by the Golden Goose’ titles, it does mean that there is a huge installed user base to which gaming products – of some sort - can be potentially sold (and it is that side of the equation that will always attract the big publishers the most).
Now, I’ll concede that I do foresee that true 'hardcore' PC gaming will probably become a bit more of a niche activity as time goes on (but then it has been moving in that direction for a while now anyway so no prizes for that ‘prediction’) and that many of the large publishing houses will continue to push toward games that focus on the 'average' PC user as opposed to the £4000 rig trend setter. However, I just don't see any hard evidence for the imminent death of the PC as a gaming platform and that games producers are no longer seeing the platform as an attractive proposition to make games for (although I’m sure they’ll continue to b*tch and complain that they aren’t getting a big enough slice of the pie, as they always have and always will ).
But as to PC game publishers writing for the general market and not the hardcore, I give you:
Oblivion 2006 release - that will not run at max on practically any PC in the country, and needs a freeware utility called oldblivion.exe to run the game even if you have more than the minimum requirements! (I know - I need it! Despite having a PC that will run HL2, Far Cry, Doom 3, FEAR et al!)
Crysis - a game that is getting more hype than any other - but will need the Vista OS and a PC that can run the Vista OS,
Lastly an industry and media that spends more time talking about new high end technologies and new high end video cards than utilizing the technology that gamers actually have in their homes. The average home PC is upgraded every three years. But games demand almost yearly updates!
Even if you accept that many PC gamers of the 90's became console gamers, it does not change the fact that many many gamers have walked away from PC gaming and gaming in general in the last 5 years or so.
So how do you explain the PS2 install base of 100 million consoles?
But as to PC game publishers writing for the general market and not the hardcore, I give you: (...) Oblivion, HL2, Far Cry, Doom 3, FEAR, Crysis
I'm sorry but I think that your examples are a bit disingenuous; HL2, FarCry and Doom 3 scaled very well on their initial release (admittedly less so FEAR) and were playable on systems at least a full generation older than the current one at the time.
Oblivion? Well that is really in a class of its own in terms of having to render a huge virtual landscape full of eye candy so is more than a bit punishing on pretty much all systems currently available, not just the older ones you refer to. The point is though that as with the likes of Everquest 2 it is quite clear that Bethesda was trying to build in an element of graphical 'future proofing', so again it's not a totally fair example IMO.
Lastly an industry and media that spends more time talking about new high end technologies and new high end video cards than utilizing the technology that gamers actually have in their homes.
I can't deny that, but then we are speaking about the PC here and that element of technology bravado has always been a part of the culture, and it’s unlikely to change any time soon.
The average home PC is upgraded every three years. But games demand almost yearly updates!
That’s not strictly true, and mainly for the reasons I have stated above. Of course you can upgrade ad-infinitum, picking up every new bit of kit when it comes out as if your wallet is going to burn a hole in your pocket. However, as you say that is the exception rather than the norm, and that is exactly why many games are created with the aforementioned wide band support in mind.
Again I have to reiterate; if the big publishers were really getting ready to jump the good ship PC altogether, would they really be going to all this effort to cater for such a diverse user base? Well no..., unless they see it as worth their while to do so!
The sales in PC department are down because developers are now busy porting games to consoles, most just switch over completely (classics like DeusEx, Thief, TES, POP.. getting ruined by going to consoles first then being lousily ported over to PC). Now PC gamers who don't bother with consoles are left with usual crappy games that have nothing but fanboy hype behind it (HL2, Doom3, Quake4, Oblivion..).
These 'recent hits' are so terrible that I wouldn't re-play them even if someone paid me to. Now we all know that since these days developers want to spend millions making sexy graphics engine (that end up NOT running on majority of PCs) to show-off the 'content' while their gameplay is still ages behind, they spend millions on advertising these games all over the place (EA, UBI..). So the end up porting these games to consoles as well to make more money off them, but the fact is, unlike consoles gamers, once the new spreads on PC games that they are s**t, people stop buying, and start pirating these crappy games instead.
No s**t the PC sales are down. Half of these developers might wanna learn from the likes of CryteK and stick to a platform unless they are ready to spend more time recreate the gameplay suited for specific platform (no, retard ports like Oblivion and DeusEx 2 don't work for us..).
Why can't developers understand that a lot of PC gamers, particularly the over 30's will still pay for and play games that are created on a budget but crammed full of gameplay. The emphasis on GFX since the 3DFX, VooDoo etc came along has pushed development too far in the wrong direction. Someone in the gaming press was recently quoted the Hi-Def GFX is as big a revolution in gaming as the move to 3D. What total b******s. A first person shooter, is still a first person shooter, no matter how realistic the GFX are.
HL2 for example really wasn't much of an improvement over the original HL apart from the Havoc physics. Doom3 was a great game engine (yes it was) but the gameplay I found to be worse than the original Doom games; all the narrative bits like emails, videos, lockers etc just got in the way of shooting, shooting and pure shooting.
Take away advancements in GFX and gaming fundamentals have changed little in the last 10 years. Game interfacing is one of the biggest improvements along with multiplayer online options. There's been improvement in AI (although play singleplayer BF2 and you could disregard my last statement) but little else. Apart from AI, interfacing and online options..
Civ4 is still very much like Civ Any FPS is still very much like a FPS from 10 years ago. Any RTS is much like Dune II A sports game is still like a sports game from 10 years ago. A racing game probably has more hills in it.
Along the way, a lot of genres have fallen by the wayside... Flight Sims RPG's Turn Based Strategy Space Combat and probably more that I can't remember.
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they see it as worth their while to do so!
