One of the highlights of this year’s GDC was that the founder of the valve and the first chief marketing officer of the company was a conversation with Monica Herrington, who had gone to his history with the company that brought us half a life and steam.
Harrington’s memories have a whole bunch to choose: Like when he gave his nephew some money to provide school, he found out that he had spent the CD room’s copier thanks to a “beautiful thanksgiving note”, and he realized that the DRM was going to be very important.
After sitting down with PCG’s Ted Lichfield, Herrington extended some other challenges facing the valve in the late 1990s, including that no one seems to focus on a new game called Half Life. You can’t really blame them: The game came to the orange box, which included a dirty graft style design with the Lamba symbol. Aesthetically I don’t mind, but I can see why it is not flying from the shelf.
Herrington felt that the valve was in trouble, and not only, it had to rely on the publisher Sierra to maintain a bargain with division and re -release the game with new box art and innovation in this case: “Game of the Year” sticker. Half of life was so reviewed that it was a legitimate claim in so many shops, and the first sticker applied to the current inventory. Soon Sierra will also publish the game with a new box art showing Gordon Freeman, which is probably not pure as the original, definitely kills me as much sales.
Long story short, he worked. Following with Herrington after his conversation, PCG asked about this special “Game of the Year” marketing techniques, which is not just common nowadays, but in some cases, may feel a bit non -earning (I remember a gate edition of Fallin’s lords, which was definitely just for the mother of the designer). Was this the first second valve?
“I feel like it,” Herrington said. “I mean definitely never been used like this. According to my knowledge, there was never a matter where a particular game got a lot of definitions in a particular year. There were there, where people would say, ‘Oh, this was an important game.’ But it was unusual to plan so quickly. “
This is one of the moments of the strange circle for the valve, where even when it was dealing with a problem in the late 90s, it was also predicting some challenges that the developers would later face later on their platform. The PCG asked Harvington what he saw as the most fundamental changes that the digital distribution brought to marketing games during his career.
Herrington said, “One of the things that, to me, almost Almost seems to be a kind of violence when I talk to people here, talk about the real challenge of trying to get rid of it.” “So now there are tens of thousands of games every year, nothing more, but it is really difficult for people to pay attention.”
Herrington advised that after being forced to start a retail -ready game, unlike uploading some files and covering art on the distribution platform, most of the “disorder” was eliminated on the day of life.
“There may not be a need for such a building that you needed for the distribution of CD room where you actually had to go out and try to send the boxes out and all these things. It was almost different, because before that there was a screening that happened earlier, because they are not getting a lot of sports because they are not getting a lot of sports. The challenge has got, ‘OK, so what have you done?’
This is a drum that Indi has often advocated: If you are not thinking about marketing your game unless you are ready to release it, you may have already lost the boat. And this is something that was baked in the process of making the game in the first phase, though despite the time when the playing was not as democratic as it is now.
Herrington did not give a big answer, though she used to talk about the importance of sports that did not take the ship, referring to a product that had never pulled out of the Microsoft door (where she also worked) because she could not say to people who could not talk about this game, and you could not talk about it. “
Herrington has a lot of gold from various stories, including an interesting revelation, where after half a life, the valve is completely out of the sports business. Gabie Neville’s eyes were on a social network in the 90s that was “not in sports context”.
