hope not
they should get knocked out in the first round by the almighty id software
id practically invented the FPS genre. doom 1 and 2 are still unmatched for what it does. quake 3 is pretty much the most competitive and fluid game around. the only thing arguably better is quake live and that's id software too. game development also involves technology, and no other developer has even come close to id in that department. also they release all their engines as open source. also, they did all this with something like 15 people.
I hope Valve wins.
id made great games in the early 90's, but when was their last good game? Quake 4 was horrible, Doom 3 equally as bad. Technology wise, id's last released engine was Doom 3, an engine which I personally hated. It seems other developers didn't love the engine either, seeing as how little it was licensed by third parties. The Doom 3 Engine was poorly optimized and had piss poor net code / multiplayer support. The engine had a limit of 4 players per server which is inexcusable for an engine released in 2005. Not exactly the work of a company that excels in game technology.
I do have to admit that releasing the source code to their engines is a great thing to do. I wish more companies did this, but it doesn't make up for their other recent shortcomings.
valve created a series where you might fall asleep during 90% of the game because you aren't doing anything (half life). the mod teams that they acquired made good stuff (counterstrike, team fortress, etc.), but i wouldn't credit valve's development with that.
It all comes down to opinion and in this case, you're in a small minority. Don't get me wrong, I respect your opinion, but I strongly disagree for a number of reasons. Valve has consistently and continues to put out games that are well reviewed and sell millions. Half-Life, Team Fortress Classic, Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Ricochet (little known game, but awesome), Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source, Portal, Team Fortress 2, and Left 4 Dead. All of these are great games [especially Portal], no matter if they were released ten years ago or released this year. As for the issue of mod teams != Valve, I disagree. Once Valve hires a mod team, they become part of Valve's development team.
As for the issue of technology, you were right when you said that technology is important in game development. If we look at the technology that Valve has developed, we essentially have A) Gold Source (The Half-Life 1 Engine), B) The Source Engine, and C) Steam. I'm not going to get into the Half-Life 1 Engine as it'll make this post far too long, but lets take a look at the Source Engine and Steam. The Source Engine is an amazing piece of software in my mind because A) it's heavily optimized, B) has great net code, and C) is highly modable by both Valve and third parties. The fact that it's highly modable allows Valve to continue to add to the engine instead of developing a new engine from scratch every two years (Such as when id ditched the Doom 3 Engine to develop the Rage engine). Left 4 Dead was released on a five year old engine, but you'd never know it playing the game. Not having to develop a new engine every x years is huge for a game studio, it saves the company money / time while also improving the quality of future games (Developers spend less time struggling with learning new tools and more time building a game in an environment they become increasingly familiar with).
As for Steam, in my mind it's one of the greatest things to happen to the PC games industry. For consumers, it allows them access to any of their games on any PC without having to worry about scratching / losing CD's or CD keys. It also provides them with a tool to keep in touch with other people they play games with, gives them awesome sales every weekend, as well as is a way to introduce gamers with games they might have not otherwise known about. I'd also argue that downloading from a server is a lot easier than going to a store, but you'll get a lot of different opinions on this one. As for developers, they get instant access to sales figures (which is huge for a business), higher profit margins (Downloading a game costs a lot less than boxing and shipping a game), access to stats that will help balance the game (ie:
As done with the Warhammer 40k beta), and
access to what hardware gamers are running which is extremely helpful when deciding what a new games minimum requirements should be. Steam is especially great for small developers. For example, the creator of Gary's Mod
made over 3 million dollars from releasing the game over Steam. Another example is the creator of
Audiosurf. I don't have any links on how much he made, but you can bet your ass it was over a million. Both of these are games that wouldn't have sold had they not been on Steam.
Another thing that comes to my mind is the fact that Valve continues to support its older games, the last patch released for Half-Life was in October of 2008. It wasn't even to address an issue with Half-Life itself, it was to solve a crashing problem that a third party mod team was running into. Which leads us to another reason why Valve is awesome, they support third party mods better than any other company in the industry. They have highly modable engines, provide great documentation of said engines, provide support to third party mods if they ask for it (Modders can literally email someone at Valve with a problem and they'll try to help solve it), and even host mods through Steam which increases said mods playercount at least ten fold.
Needless to say, I really like Valve.
