I recommend looking at companies hiring pages to get a pulse on their longer term direction and strategy (a major reason for bogus job posts btw).
Based on Valve's [0], it's mostly sustaining work for Steam Marketplace, Steamworks, and R&D for VR.
While there are people who can thrive at Valve, their structure doesn't set people up for success. Valve has a many pseudo-managers, people who have a lot of influence at the company, but aren't designated as such. Doing well at Valve often requires trying to figure out what sort of things these people want, which they often don't make clear. Getting meaningful feedback is difficult, with employees often having little idea on what they need to do differently to improve things.
It really seems like Valve is kind of a mess internally, and they probably wouldn't still be around if it wasn't for the enormous success of Steam.
This reminds me of the classic essay "The Tyranny of Structurelessness"
At Gore, it is a flat structure, but with self-organizing teams that take initiative and responsibility ("commitments") as appropriate for current goals.
The simplest way to encode a structure is with a basic hierarchal structure where power gets delegated and directions flow down from a single individual at the top, and information gets filtered and flows up to enable decision making. This is one of the most simplest and common structures you see across society. It is a structure great at quick, efficient decision making, but has numerous flaws that make it suboptimal in many cases. Notably, the single-directional flows means it's particularly bad at self-regulating, and therefore it's susceptible to corruption without a significant outside influence.
However you can leverage systems and technology to engineer and enable novel and durable alternative structures and power dynamics. On a societal level, democracy is a hugely successful example of a system like this. Elections create a loop from the bottom to enable accountability for the person at the top, helping solve a number of failure states. You also have techniques like creating multiple structures that operate in tension, structures that operate entirely via democratic consensus, etc. Each structure has different strengths and weaknesses, and combining them well can be used to create high-functioning governments.
At the level of corporations however, you see minimal exploration of optimal structure. The modern corporation has seen some innovation, but this happened almost entirely at the ownership level, with boards and shareholder elections etc. The actual executive functionality of most companies is almost entirely your standard hierarchy. It beggars belief to think that this would be the optimal operational structure across all industries. The reality is it's the structure that maximizes shareholder control (and therefore shareholder value). Other structures might enable an organization to better serve the market, employees, etc ; but these are not the concerns of the people setting up and funding said corporations.
[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...