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‘Valve Time’ allow Valve employees to have healthy work life balance
- Thread starter Arthands
- Start date
These are all games developed by valve. They have committed game development.
End of story. It doesnt fucking matter that dota 2 is a sequel when everything about it from the netcode to assets were created by valve. It doesnt make it any less of a valve game when 100% of the development has happened by valve, under valve, for valve.
What is it with you folks that they need to diminish anything that's not a singleplayer game as "not a valve game".
Going by your argument, valve has never made a single fucking game before because it can be applied to all valve games ever created bar half life.
Not like any of this matter because originality of an ip has nothing to do whatsoever with the question of wether or not a dev still develops games
Well.. to be fair, are Valve working on a huge AAA title atm?
These are hilariously tame in comparison to the delays that have happened to 80% of games announced at the past five E3s.
There should be a sticker publishers / Devs can put on their box - "created using ethical work practices".
I'm serious, that should be on the Spider-Man box and any other game that was created without crunch.
I'm serious, that should be on the Spider-Man box and any other game that was created without crunch.
I know you're trying to be clever but flat organisation doesn't mean people can do anything they want; people are still hired to do specific roles
It's sad that the AAA industry is so bad that it makes this look impressive, but being snarky about "Valve Time" isn't actually off base. Valve is really a service company, they have a ton of passive income which at this pointed is automated to the point where they basically don't do much at all relative to how much they make. I'd actually say that most medium to large sized service-based tech companies (certainly those in Bellevue) will have a similar culture, it's more expected than not. Valve has other cool perks like personal trainers for employees though.
"But they don't release games that I like every 1 to 2 years so they are lazy and the worst."
*smh*
I shouldn't be surprised anymore that a positive thread and a positive message gets shitposted to hell here, just because it is about Valve.
Eh, there are many, many companies who don't work under strict deadlines and have great work/life balance and benefits.
Crunch is very specific to a particular type of developer (generally console/multiplat AAA or shitty indie with overbearing leadership).
I wish some of you would just come out and say why you want to say- "I'm entitled a new Valve game and I'm entitled to it now!"
Yes, it is. They've promised lots of improvements for Steam (including Client/UI update) but they still haven't delivered it.
They work on lots of things, but most of their works aren't displayed on a spotlight.
Which simply a further prove of how much people here hate Valve/Steam.
Oh that was the guy who was twitting shit and had to walk it back a day later and say he wasn't really talking about valve.
Gosh i wonder what he's up to now.
I worked at Valve. It was great. There are other pressures unrelated to work/life balance, symptomatic of the culture, but it was never problematic for me. I know of others who felt differently.
It's really a magical thing to not be beholden to absolutely anyone but your own interest. The smartest things Valve has ever done: only worked on properties it owns outright and never gone public or taken on outside investment. It's truly a special placed filled with very, very talented and special people -- some of the best I've had the pleasure of working with in my career.
If mods need verification on this claim please feel free to reach out via PM, I dunno what's cool to claim without proof and what's not.
It's really a magical thing to not be beholden to absolutely anyone but your own interest. The smartest things Valve has ever done: only worked on properties it owns outright and never gone public or taken on outside investment. It's truly a special placed filled with very, very talented and special people -- some of the best I've had the pleasure of working with in my career.
If mods need verification on this claim please feel free to reach out via PM, I dunno what's cool to claim without proof and what's not.
It's great they have a good work/life balance at Valve though that combined with their lack of communcation can quickly become very frustrating.
I'm a big TF2 fan. The last really big update they did was in October of 2017 (2018 only saw a smaller scale update of content they couldn't finish in time for that update in March and a mostly community created Halloween event in October). What are they working on for TF2? Porting the game to Source 2? A Heavy update they hinted at back in 2016? Something else? Not working on it at all?
No idea. Not even a hint. I understand stuff can change in development and not wanting to make promises for stuff that might change but they really need to get better at communication.
Did you work on TF2 at all and if so what did you work on for the game?
I'm a big TF2 fan. The last really big update they did was in October of 2017 (2018 only saw a smaller scale update of content they couldn't finish in time for that update in March and a mostly community created Halloween event in October). What are they working on for TF2? Porting the game to Source 2? A Heavy update they hinted at back in 2016? Something else? Not working on it at all?
No idea. Not even a hint. I understand stuff can change in development and not wanting to make promises for stuff that might change but they really need to get better at communication.
Did you work on TF2 at all and if so what did you work on for the game?
Well.. that was quite a read. Thanks Epic for offering a chance to make.. better games?? .... ??? ..
I have no idea if he was bullshitting or not with his tweets (only the people who have worked at Valve knows that), but it was pretty entertaining to read his point of view on the politics there.
They have been rolling out updates, but not just everything at one time with big fanfare. Wishlists and chat have already been overhauled, of course there's been a lot of changes to the store's frontpage too. Personally I quite like it that way, easier to adapt when it's not all done at once. Like even with the chat, my first thought was if it's possible to keep using the old one. Now I hardly even remember how it used to be!
Seems like a bit more fanfare wouldn't hurt though. I'm quite a Steam fan, but I hardly know what they're up to. I still think a lot of people don't even know Steam input is a thing.
Steam blog is decent place to follow the updates (if anyone knows anything better, let me know too!). Latest is regarding DLC browsing (11.1). https://store.steampowered.com/news/?feed=steam_blog
So they can just join whatever project they want freely and whenever they feel like? Sounds kinda good, also sounds like much wouldn't get done. It's no wonder most of their games are on a smaller scale.
Image RDR2 or botw type game being made with that structure.
edit: played halflife 2 on my bros PC yearsssss ago wow rip
Image RDR2 or botw type game being made with that structure.
edit: played halflife 2 on my bros PC yearsssss ago wow rip
Yeah, this is what I meant that their works aren't being displayed on Spotlight. They take them as granted, or simply don't realize (or care) that they've been working on them. People simply don't see them as work, because those are not game development. People only care if Valve is working on games, not Steam, as we can see clearly from this thread.
https://www.resetera.com/threads/ex...ils-his-terrible-time-with-the-company.92211/
Consider that they buried this story and all the main media outlets ignored it.
Yeah and also the actual games get dismissed, as we had some really arbitrary definitions laid out earlier in this thread why Valve "didn't develop" Dota 2, TF2 etc. and their latest release (Artifact) didn't even get acknowledged.
It matters when they bought the concept from someone else. CounterStrike is another example of them buying up a mod of one of their existing games. I'm sorry I have a concept of the context behind their games.
When did I say this? I never said they weren't Valve games, again I added context as to how they came to be Valve games.
It's like developing a studio from scratch vs. outright buying the studio. They are two totally different things and when you mention games from 2000 as an example of recent output and demonstrate hostility when people point this out, I have to question your motivation here. I don't and will never agree with crunch or lazy devs type rhetoric. Video game development is incredibly hard and I would never diminish the work of programmers, designers, testers, etc.
Christ this thread is embarrassing. The discourse around Valve was forever tainted here and the old place because they were so instrumental in the modern rise of PC gaming, and that still pisses off people who wanted the landscape to just be their favorite platforms and nothing else.
I'm incredibly tired of seeing literal hundreds of people constantly dismissing games like Dota 2 in literally any valve or steam thread with "omg that's not a real videogame" garbage shitposts of which there already have been multiple ones in this thread as well, if i misunderstood the argument you were making, i apologize for appearing hostile.
The companies that do this successfully have a business outside of games-making.
I remember the thing from and year and i thought he seemed like a guy maybe gettin too caried away. Definitely has a problem with valve that doesn't stop at just professional, tho.
Is that it?
Maybe that's it? I've been wondering. There's something underneath it all.
Most of silicon valley subscribes to the "employees are disposable resources" and basically forces insane conditions on their employees. So even if somebody wanted to argue the non-sense that Valve isn't a gaming company, their peers outside of gaming are scummy too. No amount of gymnastics changes the fact they should be commended for encouraging an actual life.
And let's just appreciate that a ton of these AAA games have development staffs that are like 900 people strong. That's more than 2X the size of the entire Valve company. People just have unrealistic expectations about what's possible here. For Valve to create a single-player game that competed in that AAA space, it would be the same homogeneous design as all the other AAA titles (if they didn't want to lose massive amounts of money on it). It'd need to be exploitative and everything else people hate about modern AAA. So it wouldn't be old Valve games with prettier graphics anyways. That's not a market I'm sad to see Valve exit. I just hope the smaller stuff is still possible (here's hoping the three VR games are real and just being held back for the HMD unveil).
I really don't think there's any other rational explanation for it. Nothing would foster such irrational contempt unless it was rooted in jealousy.
I don't think it's a good idea to talk about the stuff I worked on, and a lot of it I can't talk about. I worked a bit on Artifact and did touch most of the current games in one way or another.
I knew there was something underlying. I'm still not sure this is the correct model. My theory was that valve was sort of an intersection of uuuhhh hate, I guess. I would say criticism, but the criticisms are so uuhhhh hateful lol. They have stepped on toes or tangentially threatened so many different groups and companies.
Really sad that this is an exception in the videogame industry. It amazes me that videogame software developers stick around in that sector, because... that's the norm in general software development.
I don't think that this is true, at least not anymore. It's certainly true of startup culture, but outside of startup culture in the software industry, the norm these days is a rejection of 1990s-work-to-die mentality. I work for a mid-major software company and have interviewed at other major/mid-major software companies, and almost all of them stress healthy work/life balance these days, and talking with employees seems to back that up. I straight up won't remotely entertain a place that expects me to give up my family or social life to make some arbitrary stupid deadline that no customers even care about, and I think most engineers are like me -- these days.
But, I think the 'startup culture' is so pervasive in our industry, that companies that aren't startups might want to be perceived as startups, or something. But most of the major software companies gave up on that.
That is pretty fantastic for Valve employees. Wish other game publishers and developers would take note and follow the valve example. People may complain about release dates and shit. But honestly I'd rather the people that make the shit I love have a chance to have a life they can love as well. Instead losing time stuck in an office late into the day burning out on game development.
User Warned: Drive-By Trolling
I mean when you put out 1 game since 2013, yeah I imagine you get a good work-life balance.
Surely, you jest?
There's more that seriously believe there's a jealous "console peasant" conspiracy going on vs the supreme majesty of Windows PCs and that's why Valve is occasionally criticised around here? Fucking hell, yes there are some embarrassing posts in here from the lazy devs rhetoeic through to this shit above.
Its good that some Valve employees seem to be happy with the working conditions although I've noticed that those who spend longer at Valve tend to leave more negative reviews on Glass door and similar compared to those who have been around a year or so. I recall one mentioning long hours there but can't access it now as I don't have the log in, I would hope it means no enforced crunch but other development studios have also not directly stated mandatory crunch yet encourage a toxic culture whereby those that object to poor conditions and pressure are ostracized and eventually replaced by those willing (usually younger, hungrier devs who will tolerate this to get their foot in the door). I think it also relates to why we haven't seen industry unionization just yet.
Still, it's nice to hear of happy developers for a change. Long may it continue.
Are you pretending they don't constantly work on and develop other things? Features? Live-Service games? Host tournaments? Broker deals? Backend? VR advancements that benefit the ENTIRE industry? Proton? Free and Opensource projects that also benefit the ENTIRE industry?
Or are you just trolling? Maybe pull your head out of thine ass, mhm?