Valve’s Gabe Newell has spoken out against platform-exclusive VR games, stating that he doesn’t think “exclusives are a good idea for customers or developers.” His comments came by the way of an email exchange with a Redditor (verified by several publications) in which he was asked if Valve had considered securing exclusivity deals for HTC Vive. Newell responded with the aforementioned statement and said that there are new developers undertaking a plethora of risks, which Valve is willing to absorb for them so that they can freely develop games. He further said that they won’t be restricted to one platform:
We’re in a much better position to absorb financial risk than a new VR developer, so we are happy to offset that giving developers development funds (essentially pre-paid Steam revenue). However there are no strings attached to those funds. They can develop for the Rift or PlayStation VR or whatever the developer thinks are the right target VR systems. Our hope is that by providing that funding that developers will be less likely to take on deals that require them to be exclusive.
That’s an interesting take in light of the recent push for VR.
What do our readers think?
[Source: Reddit]
