I (pictured) recently had a convo where I had to discourage someone from doing a vid called (roughly) "All The Times Gabe Newell Has Lied To Us". Did You Know: it's extremely hard to talk about your game without saying anything that will be untrue later on? It's really hard!

All The Times Some Dev Has Lied is going to be a short vid if you're differentiating between lying and being wrong or things changing. Lying is when you intentionally deceive! Even accidentally deceiving doesn't count. Make that distinction! Calling folks liars is really shitty!

Gabe's a useful example: both HL games, pre-release, had a lot said about them that'll seem to a consumer like there's no way you can have thought it was true. Gabe said monsters in HL1 would breed, so if you took a long time to get somewhere there'd be more of em. Didn't happen.

So was it a lie? Why would he lie? It doesn't even sound good. It was an idea they threw out.

They also said you'd be able to walk to the end of HL1 and walk back, because that constancy seemed exciting. It wasn't, so they chucked it. But it worked, it was true, and it was in.

HL2's 2003 E3 showing, Gabe said HL2's crowbar was physically simulated. It wasn't, but it had been, last he heard of it. He said the whole thing was unscripted; he probably thought it was. Six years working indirectly on a game that keeps getting thrown out and started again.

Maybe for the first three years you have marines procedurally kicking down doors, which is not even an especially tall order. At some point that drops off, and then someone asks you at E3 if the door kick was scripted and you say no. Gets leaked, people call you a liar forever.

In 2015, John Walker opened a Peter Molyneux interview with "are you a pathological liar". Incredibly out of order. Walker was so sure he knew about things that were completely outside his field that he was willing to bully someone for over an hour over their plans going wrong.

Molyneux doesn't talk about games in development anymore at all. Valve also hardly ever do. You might like transparency, and to hear about stuff while it's in development, but if you all act like jerks about it, you'll get to less and less. Bummer, right?

also if you're about to write a response like "ok but x example was a ~total lie~ tho" you've missed the point

What are you even talking about