Poll: Am I the only one who thinks the way Valve is run is kind of stupid?

[R0cklobster]

Having just read through the employee handbook, it seems like a pretty darn good idea to organise Valve the way they do. Who cares if the only reason they can afford to operate like that because of Steam (which, until there's evidence, is just an idea we don't know for certain)? They're one of the few big companies who's also a big innovator in this industry, what would removing one of the key aspects of that solve?

EDIT: missed a word

 

[J Tyran]

The system obviously works for them or Valve never would have been the success that it is. It must all start with careful recruiting. If they employed a bunch of people that would likely to sit picking their nose whilst trying to develop a rubbish 3D noughts & crosses no work will ever get done.

A company with a work system like that needs staff that show up and contribute to creative meetings where ideas get bounced around. The staff would need to motivated as well so when a particular idea starts getting momentum a team would form around it to actually make a game. The staff almost certainly ask each other for help, a game designer with an idea would need to persuade the artists and programmers to help out. Ideas, game mechanics and art from stalled or dropped projects probably gets recycled into other projects so the time spent on them wouldn't entirely be wasted.

Without responsible and competent staff that are suited to such an unusual method of operating that system could never work.

 

[Vigormortis]

snip

I guess because no other team has had the success of Valve and has only created 1 good original IP (ricochet isn't good).

Well, to be fair, Ricochet was a side experiment by one of the original Valve team members when they first formed. So it's not surprising it's not "good". Haha.

But I think you missed my point. Let's say some game designer, who's looking for a job, has an idea for a game. A game he (and perhaps a few others) have been working on on their own. After searching for a while he eventually gets hired by, say, Bioware. Once there, he offers up his idea to the company execs. They decide they like it and green-light the project. A few years later, something like Mass Effect is born.

So my question is, how is that any different from how games like Team Fortress 2 or Left 4 Dead came into being? Other game designers had ideas for their dream game and Valve gave them the resources to make those games. Why is that a bad thing? I just don't understand. It's the same thing every other game developer on the planet does. (save those that are just hired to make games for established franchises) They look for talented designers and programmers and they hire them to work on project ideas. The difference is, Valve actually gives them free choice on what to work on.

And yet, some how, that makes Valve the bad guy. It confounds me.

 

[thirion1850]

Gabe said it him self. "A product rushed is gonna suck forever." *shrug* I'm okay if they take a while to make their games. Just not forever and preferably in my lifetime.

 

[thirion1850]

snip

I guess because no other team has had the success of Valve and has only created 1 good original IP (ricochet isn't good).

Well, to be fair, Ricochet was a side experiment by one of the original Valve team members when they first formed. So it's not surprising it's not "good". Haha.

But I think you missed my point. Let's say some game designer, who's looking for a job, has an idea for a game. A game he (and perhaps a few others) have been working on on their own. After searching for a while he eventually gets hired by, say, Bioware. Once there, he offers up his idea to the company execs. They decide they like it and green-light the project. A few years later, something like Mass Effect is born.

So my question is, how is that any different from how games like Team Fortress 2 or Left 4 Dead came into being? Other game designers had ideas for their dream game and Valve gave them the resources to make those games. Why is that a bad thing? I just don't understand. It's the same thing every other game developer on the planet does. (save those that are just hired to make games for established franchises) They look for talented designers and programmers and they hire them to work on project ideas. The difference is, Valve actually gives them free choice on what to work on.

And yet, some how, that makes Valve the bad guy. It confounds me.

You are wrong there. The guys didn't come to Valve, Valve came to them after their success.

Before Valve came to them

-L4D was in production
-Team Fortress was a popular mod
-CS was a popular mod
-Alien Swarm was a mildly popular mod
-Day of Defeat was a popular mod

Valve said "hey, this is popular and free, let's monetise it". There was no goodwill involved.

And then they got the resources to become massive, popular franchises. OH NO, NUUUURSE!

Oh, I might as well mention that all the games you just described were made on THEIR ENGINE. Oops?

Captcha: Silver spoon. How appropriate.

 

[Rednog]

-snip-

Since Gabe Newell is the only known gamemaker to be a billionaire, I think it's safe to say that their system is unusual but definitely effective. I mean hell, with the way Valve not only has mountains of cash but also a monumental amount of support from its fans I think what we should be questioning here is how other developers run their businesses.

The only reason Gabe can afford this model of business is because he has Steam financing Valve. To put it another way, Steam is like a pro-profit form of crowd-funding. I'm just saying it's kind of counter-productive because it seems like Valve has no director. There's no Captain at the helm of the ship; no Sherpa up the mountain; no General to lead the army. I mean by this model, if anyone can work on any current developing projects at Valve and completely ignore other games, games like Half Life 3, Counter Strike 2, L4D 3 could have no one working on them. That the reason we're not seeing the games we really want to see, is because there is no one on hand actively pushing the project.

Steam wasn't released until 2003. Valve was founded in 1996, putting out seven games before 2003 including Half-Life and Counter-Strike, still considered to be among the best games of all time. Not to mention Half-Life's unusual and innovative cutscene-free story structure. I don't think they could have pulled off a couple of megahits like that with a system that is inherently flawed. I am no business expert, I can't explain how it works. But obviously it works for them. The evidence of that is right in front of us.

The problem with this is that they actually had a publisher before steam: Sierra.
We don't exactly have their handbook pre windfall of money via steam. If one were to hazard a guess, having an actual publisher demanding things would have made their way of doing things a lot less free as it is now.

 

[Vigormortis]

You are wrong there. The guys didn't come to Valve, Valve came to them after their success.

Before Valve came to them

-L4D was in production
-Team Fortress was a popular mod
-CS was a popular mod
-Alien Swarm was a mildly popular mod
-Day of Defeat was a popular mod

Valve said "hey, this is popular and free, let's monetise it". There was no goodwill involved.

Actually, you're wrong. I never said the mod teams came to Valve. Valve went to the mod teams because they recognized the talent therein. It's then that they offered them jobs within Valve. They didn't hire them on and then "force" them to make those games. (with the possible exception of Team Fortress Classic wherein they hired Robin Walker specifically to make it. TF2 however was his idea.) The people themselves have even attested to this in interviews. Even those that have moved on to other companies. (in case you were going to say, "Of course they say that they're still working there") It's exactly how they started in the first place. Newell shopped around the industry looking for the best and brightest designers he could find and offered them the chance to come work at his new upstart.

They didn't approach those teams with the sole goal of "buying out" those properties. If they had, like say EA or Activision would have, they'd have just paid for the franchises. They wouldn't have bothered bringing in the mod teams. Even if they had, they'd have just milked the franchises endlessly until they weren't popular. They haven't done that.

But go ahead. Keep trying to paint them as the bad guys. It's actually kind of funny to see people on this forum attempt it. Hell, I'd probably support some of the complaints if they were actually grounded in reality instead of pure rhetorical nonsense.

I mean...how about complaining over the fact that they all but abandoned Left 4 Dead 1? That irks me. Or how about the rather stupid inclusion of cosmetic items into Portal 2 like they have for Team Fortress 2? That really bugs me. Real, actual, bad choices and foul-ups on their part. If people started weekly threads on that instead of the usual "Valve sucks because I say so..." I'd actually post in them in support of those complaints.

 

[Callate]

I suspect it depends on the kind of people you hire. If you accept candidates who say, "I want to make a game based on this dream I had when I was twelve years old, and all the visuals will be my friends performing works of interpretive dance", Valve's approach wouldn't work. But if you have some talent for finding hard-working, creative people who work well together and are willing to work hard to push something they believe in into being, Valve's approach seems like a fantastic way to lure imaginative people who are tired of working eighty-hour weeks in undecorated cubicles on projects they have no stake in.

 

[CardinalPiggles]

In this case, the ends justify the means.

Also, don't think about Valve as having no motivation or no direction, they like making games, so they make games, I'm cool with that.

If it takes them 5 years to make a game, and it turns out to be amazing, then I'm fine with that too. There's plenty of other things to do with my life besides waiting for a new game to come out.

 

[Cassidy Moon]

Well, obviously, to actually run, they must be very selective in hiring, and very quick in firing. If you don't seem like a self-starter, then you don't get hired. If you do nothing productive, you get fired. Instead of a factory, it's like a garden. With a ruthless gardener. But, yeah, that's probably the reason they can't count to three.

 

[NoNameMcgee]

This has to be some kind of new record, this thread was basically /thread'ed in the FIRST REPLY POST and yet we're 3 pages into it with people repeating the same damn things.

 

[liquidsolid]

Valves development alignment is CHAOTIC GOOD. They really make great quality games, but they have very liberal release dates which change frequently due to their business model. I think it helps drive up interest, gives the company a kind of charming quality, and as long as the game is the same quality of their previous games it will be worth the wait.

Plus, it is nice to see such great working conditions at developers when I hear horror stories like Team Bondi.

 

[Tony2077]

its true you are never the only one. its amazing how many people miss use those words

It's amazing how many people freak out over a figure of speech.

Valve works. If anything, I think we should be questioning how other companies are run.

I'm not freaking out as you point it I'm just amazed how many people misuse certain words

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

For a creative company Valve's structure suits them rather well, of course they built it from the ground up and did their best to keep the lack of hierarchy but the results prove their worth.

Me and a few people form the IT dept talked about this over lunch once, Valve is in fact the middle of the road with Microsoft being the regimented end and Linux being the complete opposite end. The eventual conclusion is that while regimented and hierarchical will produce work that's will probably be on time, the end result will show it's "committee design and compromise roots." ie often being a complete piece of functional cr@p. The open design, with the main structure being "put a whole bunch of motivated people in a room and stand back" will not be able to produce the product in a timely fashion, but the end result will be the best the people can do.

All in all it's not surprising that Gabe went with the "no structure" plan with his company, remember he was once a Microsoft employee.

Recaptcha: high def

 

[WaysideMaze]

Let's say you ran a game studio and had about 100 employees all trained in whatever is needed. Your publisher has given you the IP to make 4 games released pretty frequently to each other. What you would probably do is assign 25 people to each game; the way Valve runs means that those 100 people can freely choose which game to work on, that means while 37 guys work on game A only 13 go to work on Game B.

Bit of an unfair comparison really. You're comparing Valve, an indie dev, to a studio with a publisher behind them.

Yes, they may have enough money to a fund a small army, but they are still independent of any external publisher.

 

[Animyr]

They need to get their shit together and start acting more like EA.

i no rite? EA is hte shit, 2 years dev for games, gr8t quility an gr8t management, made Me3 best ending 4 ever and orign is asum. Lotz of luve EA!

OT Valve is successful and still makes quality products, has good customer relations and doesn't seem completely obsessed with money. Doesn't matter how they're run unless child sacrifice is involved.