• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Former Employees Explain Reasons Why Valve Releases Games So Rarely

Interfectum

Member
They're barely functioning as a company.
Confused Ryan Reynolds GIF
 

diffusionx

Gold Member
They're barely functioning as a company. They're literally coasting on having a storefront. They barely make anything.

I guess we're in Valve kool-aid land over here.
They released a GOTY candidate game in 2020. They have two of the most successful games on the planet. Do you say that Riot is “barely functioning” too? They released a very successful piece of hardware last year that smashed through all sales projections and is influencing how PC games are released.

It’s weird, we live in this world where all these channels exist to make money as a vidya developer and Valve and only Valve is criticized for not putting out games in a box on a shelf like it’s 2005.
 
Last edited:

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
This is literally an article discussing the merits of organizational structures. I get that most people have probably never read it, but sociologists broke down the massive benefits of bureaucracy since the 1800s, namely increased specialization and efficiency, clarity of roles. All of that is lacking at Valve. In its place is a "Lord of the Flies" voting system. Lord of the Flies is a reference for full breakdown of team structure, constant suspicion and animosity, constant jockeying for rank over trivial and inconsequential things, and the loudest and most popular rising to the top, not necessarily the most qualitied. It's the total breakdown of merit-based assessment. It's raw tribalism.

Other companies have different flaws.
Flat organizations are best for super small places where there's hardly anyone working there. There's not many people at the company so everyone plays an important role and can have an important voice at the table.

According to Google, Valve has 360 people there. That's way too many for a super flat organization. There will still be ranks and hierarchy of some kind, but you probably got like 100+ people all the same rank trying to be their own boss, with no formal managers in a chain of command to move things along.

It would be interesting to see their organizational chart. My office has around 150 people and each department has their PPT slide showing a hierarchy tree. Many levels. It typically goes like this for each department:

VP
Directors
Managers/Leads
Solo vets
Junior and Assistant roles
 

DeepEnigma

Gold Member
They released a GOTY candidate game in 2020. They have two of the most successful games on the planet. Do you say that Riot is “barely functioning” too? They released a very successful piece of hardware last year that smashed through all sales projections and is influencing how PC games are released.

It’s weird, we live in this world where all these channels exist to make money as a vidya developer and Valve and only Valve is criticized for not putting out games in a box on a shelf like it’s 2005.
And criticized for being wHite males! Wait, did they just assume their genders?
 
Flat organizations are best for super small places where there's hardly anyone working there. There's not many people at the company so everyone plays an important role and can have an important voice at the table.

According to Google, Valve has 360 people there. That's way too many for a super flat organization. There will still be ranks and hierarchy of some kind, but you probably got like 100+ people all the same rank trying to be their own boss, with no formal managers in a chain of command to move things along.

It would be interesting to see their organizational chart. My office has around 150 people and each department has their PPT slide showing a hierarchy tree. Many levels. It typically goes like this for each department:

VP
Directors
Managers/Leads
Solo vets
Junior and Assistant roles
Ideally, they'd go flat for planning / brainstorming and then change to a standard hierarchy with defined roles after projects are locked in. But they don't, and their output is incredibly minimal as a result.

Having a flat and totally disorganized workforce might work if all you want is people tinkering on adjustments to a digital store.
 
Last edited:

Interfectum

Member
Flat organizations are best for super small places where there's hardly anyone working there. There's not many people at the company so everyone plays an important role and can have an important voice at the table.

According to Google, Valve has 360 people there. That's way too many for a super flat organization. There will still be ranks and hierarchy of some kind, but you probably got like 100+ people all the same rank trying to be their own boss, with no formal managers in a chain of command to move things along.

It would be interesting to see their organizational chart. My office has around 150 people and each department has their PPT slide showing a hierarchy tree. Many levels. It typically goes like this for each department:

VP
Directors
Managers/Leads
Solo vets
Junior and Assistant roles
My guess would be multiple buckets of flat structures with managers making sure shit works cohesively.
 

Wildebeest

Member
I think only Valve and one other tech company tried this experiment. It was a very high profile disaster at the other company, but the games industry is just more secretive and insular. Also, Valve has steam, so their game dev employees could spend all day crying and jerking off in the toilets all day and the company could still make a fortune.
 

hemo memo

Gold Member
the homogeneity at Valve is particularly striking, with the majority of employees being white and male.
Yeah so? 100% of Premier League players are men. Should we include a women just because? Majority of builders are men. Majority of maintenance workers are men. It is about talent. Shouldn’t be about filling a quota. Majority of people are smart, why don’t they just hire someone random from the street I mean why discriminate against stupid people. Why are the majority of house keepers jobs are women? Why the majority of people in prison are men? They should equalize that and put more women in.

The extreme of west world is going insane.
 

tr1p1ex

Member
It’s weird, we live in this world where all these channels exist to make money as a vidya developer and Valve and only Valve is criticized for not putting out games in a box on a shelf like it’s 2005.

It's really code for their lazy asses have had 18 years to make HL3 and still haven't delivered.
 

Interfectum

Member
They released a GOTY candidate game in 2020. They have two of the most successful games on the planet. Do you say that Riot is “barely functioning” too? They released a very successful piece of hardware last year that smashed through all sales projections and is influencing how PC games are released.

It’s weird, we live in this world where all these channels exist to make money as a vidya developer and Valve and only Valve is criticized for not putting out games in a box on a shelf like it’s 2005.
Just to bullet this... Valve has, off the top of my head:
- created the best VR game of all time
- created one of the best VR headsets of all time
- created the best portable PC gaming device of all time
- is in the process of perfecting the ability to play any windows game on linux
- created their own stable OS that is based on linux
- has multiple GaaS titles with hundreds of thousands of players
- has lured every single third party dev back to their platform after trying to be like Valve

"barely functioning" :messenger_tears_of_joy:
 

Rykan

Member
While the videogame industry as a whole struggle with diversity, the homogeneity at Valve is particularly striking, with the majority of employees being white and male.
yes, very striking indeed. Baffling how the developers of the video game industry, a form of entertainment that up until less than 2 decades ago was primarily enjoyed by white young men, is also made up by the same young men growing up playing them.

I encourage everyone with an interest in game development to join the industry, but can we stop pretending as if the lower amount of women and "Minorities" in game development has any other cause besides a lack of interest for game development from these groups?
 
Last edited:

DeepEnigma

Gold Member
Yeah so? 100% of Premier League players are men. Should we include a women just because? Majority of builders are men. Majority of maintenance workers are men. It is about talent. Shouldn’t be about filling a quota. Majority of people are smart, why don’t they just hire someone random from the street I mean why discriminate against stupid people. Why are the majority of house keepers jobs are women? Why the majority of people in prison are men? They should equalize that and put more women in.

The extreme of west world is going insane.
You never hear them crying to become sanitation workers. I wonder why that is?
 
Just to bullet this... Valve has, off the top of my head:
- created the best VR game of all time
- created one of the best VR headsets of all time
- created the best portable PC gaming device of all time
- is in the process of perfecting the ability to play any windows game on linux
- created their own stable OS that is based on linux
- has multiple GaaS titles with hundreds of thousands of players
- has lured every single third party dev back to their platform after trying to be like Valve

"barely functioning" :messenger_tears_of_joy:
Didn't they just buy a few of those games like DOTA? Then put your disorganized crew on adding small little microtransactions, because that's the size of what they can do with a few friends.

VR games are great, but it's a short game. The main reason they were the first to make it is because they just have infinite time to play around with stuff that is not going to be profitable. Lots of companies could make a AAA VR game, it just makes zero economic sense so they don't do it.

A portable PC gaming device is not impressive. It's convenient, but why is it impressive?
 
Last edited:

tr1p1ex

Member
VR headset and STeamDeck were about the store.

VR was a potential threat to STeam. So they put out a headset in hopes of keeping VR games sales on STeam.

Nintendo Switch was a threat to older pc game sales. Maybe it had an effect on STeam sales. Maybe they saw people paying full price for old pc titles on the Switch. Either way they saw a threat. And released SteamDeck.

In both cases they don't necessarily want to keep making the hardware. They would rather others follow their lead, make the hardware and use their store and at least in the case of STeamDeck use their OS as well.
 
Last edited:

Holammer

Member
Valve's game development is more like kindergarten where kids do what they want. Everyone knows that.
The real men bringing home the bacon at Valve are the guys running the store.
 

hlm666

Member
Didn't they just buy a few of those games like DOTA?
No they hired the guy who made the dota warcraft mod then had to go to court or something to win the right to use the dota name because blizzard tried to say it was theirs.

edit: then the game was made on valves own source engine.

 
Last edited:

Reizo Ryuu

Member
Should we include a women just because?
I don't think anyone is saying this, nobody likes tokenism, but it's worth exploring whether or not your statistics are formed by a (unconscious) bias or not; the only other option is to pretend discrimination isn't real.
Though there's no real way to put it to the test because you'd need access to applicant data to see if there's any skewed rejections, percentage/relative wise.
 
Last edited:

Elysion

Banned
Valve employees also highlighted a significant lack of diversity within the company, pointing to the flat organizational structure as a contributing factor.

Sounds like a bit of a conundrum for leftoids. On one hand, having a ‚flat organizational structure‘ sounds like something they would usually be cheering, but if it leads to a lack of diversity…

Wait, does this imply that diversity has to be imposed from the top, otherwise it won‘t exist? Questions upon questions…
 
I just wish they would develop single-player games again. Are we just never going to get Half Life 3? That sucks. Steam Deck is cool, tho! Probably picking one up this year.

Financially, they don’t have to make single-player games to have a strong business. So maybe that era is just over, and it’s never coming back
 
Last edited:

SaintALia

Member
How hilarious, people writing off an article because of two sentences which the article isn't even based on. I'm not a fan of Era, but the two sites went so far away from each other it's utterly comical. I'm wondering how much of it is 'triggered anti-wokeness' or 'Valve defense force'.

Either way, I do actually want a Half Life 3, despite me not being the biggest fan of HL 2, liking 1 more. We've had a bunch of Left4Dead clones since 2 so it's not too bad, but I feel nothing ever quite captured what HL was. A HL3 would be nice.....a proper sequel to the original FEAR would also be nice(didn't like F2 all that much)...but the industry is what it is....they're making bank off the Steam Store so why even bother.
 

hemo memo

Gold Member
I don't think anyone is saying this, nobody likes tokenism, but it's worth exploring whether or not your statistics are formed by a (unconscious) bias or not; the only other option is to pretend discrimination isn't real.
Though there's no real way to put it to the test because you'd need access to applicant data to see if there's any skewed rejections, percentage/relative wise.
A company main goal is to make money. They would hire a monkey if that would bring more revenue. Why wouldn’t they not hire more women if that is more beneficial? And why idiotically the first train to jump to by is this tiring argument and assumption that it must be discrimination knowing that very few women are interested in working in the industry in general? I mean should I go to every hospital and sue them for discrimination because the majority are women nurses?
 

AndrewRyan

Member
For their next explosive expose they should investigate any university computer science classroom in the US and expose why there isn't more diversity.
 
  • Praise the Sun
Reactions: Fuz

MarkMe2525

Gold Member
Valve currently has 2 of the most popular video games on planet Earth, released a groundbreaking game that is still the best example of VR, and oh yea changed PC gaming with the Steam Deck.

If that is failure then what does that say about the rest of the industry?
The topic is not about whether valve is a failure or not.
 

DeepEnigma

Gold Member
How hilarious, people writing off an article because of two sentences which the article isn't even based on. I'm not a fan of Era, but the two sites went so far away from each other it's utterly comical. I'm wondering how much of it is 'triggered anti-wokeness' or 'Valve defense force'.

Either way, I do actually want a Half Life 3, despite me not being the biggest fan of HL 2, liking 1 more. We've had a bunch of Left4Dead clones since 2 so it's not too bad, but I feel nothing ever quite captured what HL was. A HL3 would be nice.....a proper sequel to the original FEAR would also be nice(didn't like F2 all that much)...but the industry is what it is....they're making bank off the Steam Store so why even bother.
It's an agenda piece. Happy now?
 

Tams

Gold Member
What a load of waffle. People Make Games can be so pretentious.

It's down to two things:

1. They make so much money with Steam that there's little incentive to push a game to release.
2. That money allows them to have effectively unlimited time to work on any game. And perfectionism almost always kicks in then, and nothing gets anywhere near finished.
 

diffusionx

Gold Member
They last released a regular, “boxed” game in 2020. How often should Valve be releasing games? What is an acceptable number of videogame releases for them? They have about the same number of people on staff than a dev team at Ubi, how long does it take them to make a game? How many people have worked on Skull & Bones? Rocksteady has been working on Suicide Squad for 8 years at this point, are there any pieces about what’s taking them so long?

The criticisms are completely incoherent and nonsensical. Obviously this is a hit piece.
 
Last edited:

Reizo Ryuu

Member
A company main goal is to make money. They would hire a monkey if that would bring more revenue. Why wouldn’t they not hire more women if that is more beneficial? And why idiotically the first train to jump to by is this tiring argument and assumption that it must be discrimination knowing that very few women are interested in working in the industry in general? I mean should I go to every hospital and sue them for discrimination because the majority are women nurses?
ok, you're arguing things I didn't say.
 
Top Bottom