I have several friends who used to work at Valve none of them hate the place, they still have friends there, etc. But they tell similar stories as to why things that normal companies do successfully are impossible at Valve. Perhaps it’s best summed up by something one friend said about her year and a half at Valve: “I first learned who my boss was on the day she fired me.”
Google tried this, notoriously dense grating and then firing basically all the managers at an all-hands. That didn’t work out well at all... And now they have over-steered in the opposite direction!
By "things" do you mean "build an even moderately successful PC game distribution platform"? Because no one else has managed to do that. Epic, EA, Xbox, Ubisoft, and a dozen others have tried, none of them reached 10% the popularity of Steam, and if they still exist today its because they have one keystone game keeping them alive.
Or, by "things" do they mean "make successful games"? Because Valve does that too; they produce games that have far more and longer success than most publishers. They've had failed projects, sure; its funny how when projects fail in hierarchically structured companies, as they do every day, we just put our hands up, retro it, and move on; but when they fail at Valve it has to be because they don't have managers, right?
Do your friends mean "be profitable"? Couldn't be that; Valve is tremendously profitable by any account. Highly productive? No... they're also that. Loved by customers? Strike three, Valve also checks that box.
I guess you could argue that "things" means "build twenty different directly competing messaging apps". Got me there, Google's army of managers did manage to do that when Valve couldn't.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/charts/topselling/global - in top 100 games by revenue for 12 years
As for Counterstrike 2; I'll believe anything you're rambling about actually matters when it spends just 24 hours outside of the top 5 most played games on Steam. Its #2 right now. Dota is #3. You're welcome to channel Trump and argue that they're cooking the books on their player-counts, but that's about the only argument you've got that has any chance of being right.
Why do you think long time players of CS use FaceIt to play? That should immediately strike you as odd that the most dedicated demographic of the game is not even using Valve's servers. And do you really think people would still play at the rates they are if there were no skins?
>they're cooking the books on their player-counts
They are not, however some non-zero amount of the player base is bots farming free weapon case drops.[0][1] At one point these were making hundreds of thousands a week. No other game has this issue.
>that's about the only argument you've got that has any chance of being right.
Do you even play this game? It seems strange to make a claim about a game you have never played. Everyone who plays this game agrees that Valve has failed to make the game better and after almost a year people still agree that cs:go was better, although Valve deleted cs:go from steam so nobody can play it anymore.
[0] https://www.pcgamesn.com/counter-strike-2/csgo-case-drops
[1] https://www.dexerto.com/csgo/csgo-community-mocks-player-cou...