Steam Summer Sales 2013 and a Valve retrospecive.

With the steam summer sales in full swing I've gotten alot of cool deals on what is my favorite platform of this generation. However I found an old page in my notebook thats basically a quick retrospective on how the valve company and steam came to be.

When Gabe Newel released half-life in the 90s. the game's "goldsrc" engine was said to be "a heavily modded quake engine". and it indeed looked like it. Eventually one of quake's most popular mods "quake: team fortress" was ported over as a stnadalone remake call "team fortress classic". Later there was also a tribute to the popular game (Quake) itself, and it was called "deathmatch classic". While using the goldsrc engine, it had most of the weapons from quake and almost the same game mechanics. THe only difference by defaut was some added half-life weapons such as the crowbar and a different move speed (depending on the server settings). Valve never tried to pretend that it wasn't heavily inspired by other games that inovated before them, and most of thier other on half-life games were based off user created mods, such as counter strike, a terrorist vs counter terrorist team/strategy based FPS, ricochet, a multiplayer tribute to the movie TRON's lightdisk battle scene. These days however there seems to be a  problem with developers that copy other games. The main problem is that while not citing your sources of inspiration is downright rude, failing to add any innovation to customize your own product and expecting the group to pay for it is downright degrading to the gamer themselves. The gamer in my opinion deserves the most respect out  of everybody, as they are the ones funding the game industry themselves. Sure there may be a new coat of paint, but the problem is its always the same old crap at the core, and no one wants to pay 60 dollars for a rehash of crap. At least not this gamer. I refuse to encourage this practice.