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Former Valve employee essentially describes it as a dysfunctional technolibertarian hellscape


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I honestly have no real gauge of how much is actually getting done in Valve. Most importantly they keep Steam up and running, but I feel like it's been in maintenance mode for a long time. Dota2 remains a thing. Artifact seems to be getting made, and every once in a while a mobile game comes out. I know they built a lot of the tech for the Vive, but at this point I'm unclear how much of that work is them and how much is HTC.

 

Still,  it seems like a company with their resources should be far more productive. So either their efforts are focused on things I'm not noticing, I'm underestimating the work required for their current output, or they're just really unproductive in general.

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4 hours ago, DarkStar189 said:

I'm guessing they make so much money per month just by keeping the Steam store up and running that they don't have to do anything ever. 

Correct. And since they're not publicly owned, they don't have to dedicate every possible moment of their company's existence to the impossible goal of infinite growth.


Sometimes this is good for us consumers, sometimes it's bad. But I think overall they tend to do what they want to do, rather than what anyone tells them to do. I don't want a Valve game made by people who don't want to make it. That sounds much worse than nothing.


At the same time, it sure would be nice if enough people there wanted to make Half-Life 3 or Portal 3 that it actually got done.

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A tiny part of me is still hoping that there's going to be a new Box with Half Life 3, Portal 3, and Team Fortress 3, and they're just waiting until all three are done before mentioning any of them. And it's going to stealth release on my birthday and GabeN will personally deliver me a Steam key for it, etched into one of his beautiful knives. 

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12 hours ago, Xbob42 said:

Correct. And since they're not publicly owned, they don't have to dedicate every possible moment of their company's existence to the impossible goal of infinite growth.


Sometimes this is good for us consumers, sometimes it's bad. But I think overall they tend to do what they want to do, rather than what anyone tells them to do. I don't want a Valve game made by people who don't want to make it. That sounds much worse than nothing.


At the same time, it sure would be nice if enough people there wanted to make Half-Life 3 or Portal 3 that it actually got done.

It's quite possible that I've gotten a false impression from this particular twitter thread and the other things I've read from inside Valve, but it seems less like an issue of "are there enough people that want to make HL3" and more of an issue of Valve's internal structure making organizing and managing such a project difficult if not impossible.

 

I agree it's a great thing that Valve isn't in a position where they have to pump out new sequels every year to satisfy shareholders or stay afloat. With the latitude that affords them, they have the freedom to do anything, it's a shame that we see so few fruits that freedom affords.  

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4 hours ago, Kal-El814 said:

You mean a technocratic libertarian organization is a poorly organized shitshow?

 

Shocking.

Just about every company I've ever worked for is a poorly organized shit show. I've been meaning to rant about this for awhile, but I'd bet every last one of us could easily point out how grossly inefficient where we work is. Gabe just has the luxury of Steam printing money and just being rich enough to not really give a shit, since he has no shareholders to please. Even if you work for a small company, it just takes the owner hiring one fuck up family member or friend, or a secretary/manager he really just wants to fuck and now you have a poorly ran for profit business.

 

If you work for any large scale public company, it's almost as bureaucratic as the fucking government filled with people working just hard enough to not get fired. 

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39 minutes ago, Dodger said:

Just about every company I've ever worked for is a poorly organized shit show. I've been meaning to rant about this for awhile, but I'd bet every last one of us could easily point out how grossly inefficient where we work is. Gabe just has the luxury of Steam printing money and just being rich enough to not really give a shit, since he has no shareholders to please. Even if you work for a small company, it just takes the owner hiring one fuck up family member or friend, or a secretary/manager he really just wants to fuck and now you have a poorly ran for profit business.

 

If you work for any large scale public company, it's almost as bureaucratic as the fucking government filled with people working just hard enough to not get fired. 

My job has both I work at a city owned parking garage ran by a large scale public company. So when we need new equipment desperately because the current equipment is falling apart it takes forever for it to be approved by the city. Both exit gate computers shut down randomly or sometimes don't work at all. The second entrance gate hasn't worked in probably two years. We have been trying to get new equipment since February but I'm not sure if it will even happen this year.

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