When Le first approached Steam about supporting Tactical Intervention three years ago, it hadn't yet embraced the business model that was rapidly changing the way that games were developed, sold and played. "All I wanted was to explore new mechanisms in game design, but having that aspect of free-to-play really did put a burden on development"Īnd the decision to go it alone was taken due to another disruptive force to emerge since the release of Counter Strike: free-to-play. Simply: if you aren't on Steam, your chances of success are exponentially worse a significant proportion of the audience won't even contemplate playing outside of its confines.
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While Le can understand the PC gaming community's loyalty to Steam - he praises Valve's platform for convenience and user-friendliness - he believes that their devotion has created a sort of tacit monopoly in the market.
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It was a huge problem for us to convince people to play our game, because they didn't even want to install it." "They were really against installing a separate launcher and that sort of thing. "We found that a lot of the players were really turned off by the fact that it wasn't on Steam," he says. This, Le believes, will correct one of the problems that most undermined Tactical Intervention's chances of success on its first attempt. Le recently signed with the German publisher RNTS, which plans to relaunch the game globally through Steam. It's probably not the best thing to be working with a publisher that doesn't cater to hardcore FPS games."īut Tactical Intervention is far from dead. The publisher felt that, in order to get that retention, it would involve a lot more money to promote the game. We weren't getting a lot of player retention. "They were kind of disappointed with the numbers we were getting. "We were publishing in North America with a publisher that was mainly geared towards casual games," Le says when I meet him just before his talk. Tactical Intervention launched in March this year, and its servers were closed in June. Indeed, Le moved to South Korea from his native Canada in 2008 to secure funding from a local publisher called OGPlanet - a considerable personal sacrifice for Le, and one that didn't pay off as he had hoped. Not just because of the huge success of his 1999 Half-Life mod, but because of the ambiguous fortunes of his latest project: Tactical Intervention, an online FPS five years in the making.
Le is attending Barcelona's Gamelab conference to speak about the challenges facing contemporary developers working with multiplayer shooters, and he is uniquely placed to comment. "A lot of players were really turned off by the fact that Tactical Intervention wasn't on Steam. As the co-creator of Counter Strike, Le was responsible for one of the biggest evolutionary leaps in the industry's most popular genre a game important as Quake or Half-Life to the development of the modern first-person shooter, and an important milestone for the growing popularity of e-sports.
Fame and influence don't always go hand-in-hand, and Minh Le is walking, talking proof of that fact.
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