I think Valve's flat structure strategy has mildly failed and they should try something else. Unless they still desire to all-in on the strategy of creating products and hoping to land a another billion dollar baby, then sure, this strategy is good for that. However Valve kind of advertises itself as a video game company, and if someone is interested in making video games I feel like they'd actually be a bit disappointed after a while of working at Valve, simply because it seems so unlikely for them to actually ever release a video game.
And the bonus structure that I recall also seems dated. iirc it was setup in a way such that delivering new projects would land you a bonus. But this incentivizes creating things, but there is no incentive to continue supporting or updating or iterating on it. In my opinion the bonus structure should be done in such a way so that if you deliver something new, you would land a bonus, and then you'd get larger bonuses at the 1 year mark, 2 year mark, etc, if that thing has been updated and improved.
Many things these days are not just a single product that you release and that's that. They continually live on, they're a service, they're interacted with for years. Valve has fallen behind in this regard. Even smaller things like mini-features in Dota 2 for example would be released, which likely earned someone a small bonus, then left by the wayside to fall apart.
I love Valve conceptually but I really wish they'd iterate on their company design instead of thinking they've "solved it" I guess. I wish they were more video game focused. Obviously I don't know how it actually is in there these days, but things like this manual and other hearsay / rumors are the best I have to go off of.
From a purely financial perspective, they SHOULD continue to focus on marketplace dominance via STEAM. Whatever game is made for HL3/TF3 will ultimately fail to meet fan expectations (Duke Nukem anyone?).
I see this echoed relatively often, and I have to wonder by what metric people consider valve have "failed" when they're the largest video game distribution platform on PC, raking in money hand over fist and constantly trouncing their competition such as EGS, Galaxy, Origin and UPlay. People don't just use steam because they have to, they choose to use it because it's the superior product.
> I wish they were more video game focused
I suppose a lot of people look at Valve and think because they haven't made a hit game in a while that's why they're a failure? Personally I couldn't care less if they never made another game again; there are thousands of video game companies making great games every year, and no-one else is doing what Valve are doing in regards to Proton and other Linux desktop work. The steam deck isn't a particularly novel idea, but it's definitely one of the best examples of a handheld portable gaming device running a desktop OS.
For someone who used to be a diehard GOG fan due to their no DRM policy, my entire library is now on Steam due to their Linux efforts, not just because it's the best client, but because I want them to keep doing what they're doing.
I think network effects play a bigger role (no user wants to have to juggle multiple game launchers and developers mostly cannot afford to not be on Steam) but yeah their competition being overly greedy and/or incompetent does help as well.
If all your failures are as "mild" as the "failure" of Valve's flat structure, you will have a very nice life.
> However Valve kind of advertises itself as a video game company, and if someone is interested in making video games I feel like they'd actually be a bit disappointed after a while of working at Valve, simply because it seems so unlikely for them to actually ever release a video game.
They've released a game every year or every other year since they were founded. That's more than a lot of studios, and the fact that they also do stuff with steam and hardware makes it that much more impressive.
> They continually live on, they're a service, they're interacted with for years. Valve has fallen behind in this regard. Even smaller things like mini-features in Dota 2 for example would be released, which likely earned someone a small bonus, then left by the wayside to fall apart.
This would be a more valid critique of Valve's management structure if companies with traditional management structures didn't do the same damn thing. World of Warcraft has had dozens of abandoned features over the years, and Activision-Blizzard has a normal management structure. This is just general software industry shit, I can't think of any company that doesn't leave some stuff on the side because the focus moved onto something newer and shinier.
> I love Valve conceptually but I really wish they'd iterate on their company design instead of thinking they've "solved it" I guess. I wish they were more video game focused.
Well if they had traditional management, the game development part of the company would have been deleted a loooong time ago, and Steam would be completely enshittified by now.
I think there are valid criticisms of what they're trying at Valve, but 1) I'm glad they're doing it, I don't want every company to operate the same MBA playbook, and 2) I don't think the problems are really problems for the customer! It seems like it's mostly a problem for _employees_.
If the reddit rumors are believed to be true, the former leads of DotA (Icefrog?) and TF2 (Robin Walker) are heavily involved in it's development.
And just adding on to this, they also a have a stable of some of the most successful (and presumably lucrative) games released in the last 20 years: dota 2, cs:go (admittedly, not in-house to start), TF2.
Granted, a lot of these are towards the autumn of their lifecycles, but it can't be discounted.
Has it not already been shit for like 15 years? It's 2003 shitware with an electron skin on top of it, with a predatory skin marketplace that you can't withdraw funds from and lootbox mechanics included in all their live service games (of which that is all valve has made in the last 15 years excluding HLA).
Valve was never a good company. I would argue their early business model directly lead to the death of game modding in the first place because in their first few years they straight up stole the IPs of successful mods to turn into second rate games internally, usually not giving original developers any cuts of the proceeds beyond a normal position at the company.
It will need to do something very fresh if it wants to compete.
Valorant felt extremely fresh and slick compared to both CSGO and Overwatch while fitting nicely inbetween. They brought innovation and UX improvements to the format that even CSGO ended up copying after it had been resting on it's laurels for too long.
They have however refocused on cash-cow live-service games rather than the polished single player experiences they were originally famous for. In the 13 years since Portal 2 they've only released one single player game, and that one was driven by their company-wide VR push more than anything else. It's harder to get excited about their games when they no longer want to make anything that can't be leveraged into an infinite money siphon.
They've also had an uptick in disastrous flops with Artifact and Underlords, hopefully Deadlock will be a return to form.
You could argue that it has been, but "being shit" and "enshittification" are different things.
I don't think it's been shit. As a customer, Valve is one of the only companies left that I feel good about giving money to.
But it simply has not been enshittified. From Doctorow:
"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them."
Valve hasn't started abusing gamers to benefit developers in any way that I can tell. Compared to the rest of the video game industry, Valve treats both very well.
> I would argue their early business model directly lead to the death of game modding in the first place
Game modding isn't dead or anywhere close to dead, so no.
> if someone is interested in making video games I feel like they'd actually be a bit disappointed after a while of working at Valve.
In 2018, valve aquired Campo Santo. They were a 12 person company who made Firewatch and were working on a new game.
Since then, one of the founders worked on writing Half-Life Alyx. The rest have done little to nothing at valve despite being industry veterans who alwys seemed passionate about games. At least half of the employees at the time of the aquisition have left valve. Im too lazy and sick to look up everyone, but the people who wanted to make games left to good companies where they could work on games.
I personally am happy for the Campo Santo team that they hopefully did well financially in the acquisition, but I an sad that a team working on novel narrative games with high production values was disbanded with little to show for it.
I certainly think Deadlocks ui is unfinished, but the gameplay is certainly something that hasn't been done super well.
I don't love deadlock yet but haven't played it much. Plus, my opinion means nothing, I thought Artifact was a great game.
Deadlock is more like a moba shooter.
(That’s not a bad thing but first-person MOBAs have fallen from favor a bit… which I suppose does leave a market gap.)