When did that happen, I completely missed it. I don't see many similarities with Valve's lighthouse tracking in any of the Oculus implementations so far.
This was from before that. The whole reason that Facebook even purchased Oculus was because of the tech that Valve was giving Oculus. The Valve team liked Oculus and even if the Kickstarter you see people like Gabe saying that they think Oculus will be a big game changer.
Then there was the "Room" that is what made Facebook buy Oculus? In the end Facebook wanted to also buy out Valve because they were the other part of the equation of what made the Oculus where it was at that point. Valve said no but Facebook came around with a big check to who would ever leave Valve and world for Facebook.
Funny enough I don't think any of those people even work for Facebook/Oculus anymore and even the original Oculus devs have left Facebook as well.
At least this is what I have read multiple times. Valve giving out tech makes sense and they have done stuff like this. I mean with AR they did the same thing, they let their AR team keep their tech after they left Valve (normally other companies would prevent that and even sue in some cases, like Zenimax did with Oculus. I can't recall if Valve was also sued as well but I think Oculus/Facebook/Samsung were sued though)
Here's what a verified former Valve employee said about
Tyler/Valve News Network:
Everything you need to know about the next Half Life game: Half Life VR - ValveNewsNetwork (RUMOR)
FinalFlame has also been hinting at HLVR perhaps being linked to some bigger project in Valve, perhaps it could be this Streaming platform. No idea how long ago they were at Valve though so things could have changed.
I think FinalFlame said that they left Valve in 2017 (2016 maybe?) But from what I recall they did not leave that long ago. So they were still at Valve within the last 5 years at least and that was the period in which Valve was already doing VR stuff and also when they were working on the new Steam library as well.
I've noticed that some people mention how it would be crazy for Valve to just release HLVR without much marketing. But I mean is it that unusual?
I mean people say that Valve has been doing nothing for the last 8 years or so but they have managed to get by. They have release a number of different features and things and a lot of that has been done without the need of spending millions of dollars on marketing like other companies and the money they save from doing that they can spend on making the game better.
As I have pointed out multiple times what "marketing" does Valve do? It's one of their greatest strengthes and greatest weakness. People that are already in the Steam echo system potentially have access to what Valve is doing and sort of know about it. And even then the most Valve has to do is send a few press releases and hold an event to show something off.
Look at the Valve index, it is by far one of the best VR headset, way better than the PSVR, HTC Vive, and the Oculus Rift and it cost way more than those headsets. How much has Valve spent on marketing the thing? Probably not nearly as much as Sony, HTC or Facebook has (hell from reviews it seems like the Vive Cosmos is not that good and that probably got more marketing compared to the Index, I think some people even called the index the Vive Index at one point) but in the end it's still selling, people are buying the HMD.
I am not actually sure any more if HTC did so some sort of ad for the Cosmo. As for the index I didn't see any official video by Valve for it and the only official videos for it are on Steam. Either way I think people get the idea.
As I'm sure you are also aware the Index is not available everywhere, in places like Japan and Canada (and other places) you can't buy the device officially but yet some people are still importing the device. In Japan people that use VRChart are among the ones that are trying to but the Index and Index controllers and in Canada you do have people like Linus S. with one (and he likes it). So without spending many months spending millions of dollars, in marketing,Valve was able to generate interest in their product)
I think I was going to say some other things but this is the general gist of it. So if they are willing to do with with hardware that cost them a tone of money will they not also maybe do something similar with software?
Things like CSGO and DotA 2 after all of these years are still popular but I don't see Valve spending a lot of time (outside of eSport events) advertising these games. They are active talking with the community that are playing these games it seems but they don't seem to be trying to actively trying to get new players into the game. As a comparison of you have been on YouTube you more than likely have seen a League of Leagues ad (if not multiple by different people) with in the last 2 years? And I think some others have also done with with their games (games as a live service) but I don't think I have seen something like that for a Valve game.
Steam is all the advertising that they need.
