Over a decade ago, Source, the successor to Valve’s original engine (GoldSrc) debuted with titles like Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike: Source. Now that Valve has officially announced Source 2, it looks like it will see the light of day this year.
What will that mean for their existing catalog of games?
If we look back to the release of Source, they drew some lines for porting. They ported the original Half-Life, mostly as an example of portability between the engines. It was a loyal port, without taking advantage of anything new to the Source engine.
They did a less direct port of Counter-Strike. Counter-Strike: Source was a mild evolution from the original mod-turned-product version of Counter-Strike. They also ported Day of Defeat as Day of Defeat: Source. Although I never played the original Day of Defeat, my impression is this was another mild evolution.
They did not port Team Fortress Classic. They did not port Ricochet, either. They waited to make Team Fortress 2, which was a reimagining.
What has changed since the Source release is mainly the addition of economies to games. Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Dota 2 all have economies.
Economies create a fresh challenge for porting of games. Previously, a port was a way to revitalize an aging game, to improve on its graphical quality, and so on. But with players having a set of game items, how do you move them to a new version without either entrenching game-wealth by porting their items (thus alienating new players), angering players that have game-wealth (by not letting them carry items over), and make adjustments to gameplay (by eliminating or modifying old items to fit the new game)?
Not all those challenges apply equally to each of the games. In CS:GO, for example, the items are skins only. They do not have gameplay implications in the same way that TF2 items have.
Other challenges exist because of the economies that exist. If the new game is more popular (as is expected), the old version’s items suddenly become less valuable. This means that players will seek to cash out rapidly, which crashes the old economy further, while the scramble for the new items creates a bubble in the new game.
How to handle the economy problem for new versions of existing games seems very difficult. But the incentive to create new versions of games for new engines is likely too great to continue to adding content to existing games while also creating new titles in those traditions.
I suspect the solution will be some mix. Players can carry some value from their existing items, but not the whole value. That may be done through crafting or similar mechanisms. It will likely involve PRNGs (Pseudo-Random Number Generators) so that some level of risk is involved.
But Valve is very creative, so time will tell what solutions they find and how they are received.