Valve are funding VR projects, exclusivity-free, with "pre-paid Steam revenue"
In an e-mail sent by a Redditor and posted to the r/Vive subreddit, Gabe Newell has revealed how Valve are supporting VR developers. He also clarified Valve's position that they don't think exclusives are a good idea "for customers or developers."
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On the funding side, the reason Valve are doing this is because of risk. Gabe says that they are in "a much better place to absorb financial risk as a new VR developer" and that developing for VR is generally a "triple-risk whammy - a new developer creating new game mechanics on a new platform." Therefore, they're giving funding in the form of "pre-paid Steam revenue." He doesn't go any further into this example, but presumably it means that those who accept the money pay it back over time from their profits from Steam sales, or elsewhere, assuming they finish.
However, Valve don't demand that these developers release on Vive. "They can develop for the Rift or Playstation VR or whatever the developer thinks are the right target VR systems." Valve do this because they think it will let developers avoid exclusivity deals, which, obviously, would be bad for everyone - Valve, the developers and customers.
Here's the full email, from Reddit user elpollodiablo187
This is Gabe Newell, isn't it? He's one of my personal heroes. I mean, he called the toxicity of the Windows Store back around Windows 8, saying that Microsoft would lock games into exclusivity deals to spite other PC storefronts. What's happening now? Games like ReCore, Scalebound, We Happy Few, and quite a few others are ... locked into exclusivity deals so that they can only appear on the Windows Store! Which is kind of a death sentence on the PC, since I haven't heard of even Windows 10 users actually bothering with it.
And it's doubly a death sentence because, quite frankly, Microsoft has a history of promising PC users everything in the world and then abandoning them. Look at Games for Windows Live. So these poor bastards are buying into Microsoft's silken lies only to see barely any sales before Microsoft shuts down their own Store in a big hissy fit again. Again again.
Newell called that.
And he understands why exclusivity is bad. Steam is a pretty equal opportunity platform. Want to publish a game outside of Steam? Go ahead, feel free to upload your game anywhere. Want some of Steam's delicious bandwidth? Okay, so long as your game can be bought on Steam, just crank out however many keys you like to sell the game on other storefronts, allowing them to take advantage of our bandwidth.
So of course this is the attitude he has. It fits perfectly with his attitude since forever. He hates exclusivity. He always has. Valve will even go so far as to fund things to not be exclusive, because that's what Newell is like.
Why does he do this?
It's the long game. He plays it. He plays it so damn well that I actually think he's able to see the future. He's called so many things. Even SteamOS is there in preparation for Vulkan, for when everyone decides they've had just about enough of Microsoft's anti-competitive, spying, manipulative crap.
So... Yay Gabe Newell!
Actual MS has said they're interested in selling games on Steam again, and Dead Rising 4 will only be exclusive to W10 for 90 days.
So, they're making some good announcements, but we'll still have to see if they follow through.