This will not work. You'll have to address me on something besides myself and see how it goes.
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Anon: "I worked at Valve a few years back, and I could write a book about what's wrong there" (Update: Verified ex-Valve employee comments in thread)
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This will not work. You'll have to address me on something besides myself and see how it goes.
Can it be a failure when the company makes billions for decades?
Financially? Probably not.
As game developers? It's hard to deny that they went from the cream of the crop to creatively bankrupt, or at very least comically dysfunctional in their ability to release titles with any sort of consistency.
Not everyone can handle specific corporate cultures, nothing wrong with that. In the last decade I was in the same Industry (Callcenter) but in different companies with different work-cultures even in the same company on different floors or projects. The one I loved and where I flourished for 7 years on a specific project, was the same company who made me quit after 10 months on another project because the work-culture and the "feeling" and interaction of the team was different.
Don't care, Steam is the most important thing that happened to PC Gaming dwarfing everything Valve could have put out in the last 15 years.
Like 99% of developers
Like Blizzard,
Like Bungie
Like Activision
Like EA
Why can't you guys just get over it? They've changed their main focus from game development to creating a platform. Some of you sound like them focusing on Steam instead of whatever game you wanted was a personal slight.
All of those companies have released atleast one (1) good game in the past 6 years so that puts them ahead of Valve by a healthy margin
"They're a good developer"
"Well I mean they aren't very good at developing games"
"Wow you're taking this so PERSONALLY cant you just accept they're focusing on something else?????????????"
I already "got over it". I don't expect anything from Valve as a game developer anymore. I haven't for years at this point.
Doesn't mean I have to pretend I didn't notice the pattern.
Lmao. Okay, I'll bite. Which games (plural) have been bad, according to you?
I mean, if all there is to artistic merit is the amount of $$$ you generate, it sounds like you'd honestly be the ideal Valve employee.
CS:GO has been mostly good to great (outside of obvious fumbling of stuff like the skins) but Artifact was a complete mess and Dota 2 has literally never ever gotten off the ground. It's not "dead" certainly and it can be fun to watch but they never really figured out how to make it anything other than a decades old mod.
So I mean, in the past 5 years, what have they produced worthwhile from a GAME perspective. I'm not a stockholder so I don't give a shit if TF2 is still making sure employees get bonuses.
They're still making games, they just have no obligations to release them. Games aren't their main focus anymore but it did seem they might be moving back into trying to make some. Though I wouldn't be surprised if the "game" games they come up with are all VR.
Dota 2... literally never ever gotten off the ground?
What am I reading
I don't see how their effectively halted game output points to the company being all screwed up, having a bad work environment, or being some kind of sinking ship. Their business shifted away from making games years ago.
Sounds reasonable to be disappointed. Even stay disappointed for 10 years. Your disappointment in their failure to make games is just that.
Sounds reasonable to be disappointed. Even stay disappointed for 10 years. Your disappointment in their failure to make games is just that.
In terms of improving as a game. Not from a financial perspective (I mean people say the game is dead now but I think that's bullshit, it's clearly thriving from a financial perspective even with a smaller playerbase)
So having almost 535,000 players concurrently right now is considered a small playerbase?
Alrighty then.
Yeah the more I think about it the more I feel comfortable saying Valve is effectively Google in miniature. The open structure does a lot to lead to interesting passion projects that flame out when people move on to new work, and the libertarian-ish mindset that seems to be a driving force of the company has led to bad stuff like the way the community-supported translation work basically blew up in their faces not to mention all the Nazi stuff.
As far as tech companies with their attitudes go they don't usually register as a particularly egregious group and I figure that for anyone who enjoys quasi-unstructured work environments it's actually probably one of the better tech companies to work for. That said I do start taking issue with people who make them out to be particular heroes of the industry as we've seen in, uh, game store wars threads lately.
I guess you'll be in for a nice surprise once the games they've been very candid they're working on finally release :)
I think there's this fundamental difference between how some here perceive Valve and what Valve is actually doing. I assure you they are still very good at making games, they are just under no pressure to release them at any time other than when they want to. Their success has allowed them to dedicate as much time and resources as is needed to their ongoing projects. I think people will ultimately be pleased with the results.
Not improving the game? Then why after 7 years the game still has between 800k and 1 million players per day? Thats a small playerbase?
Whomst among us can't remember the greatness of
- Moving to a client with worse input lag and performance
- After 7.0 the game lost 3 million users, it made the game worse (even if later changes fixed some of the issues)
Ultimately for me Dota 2 got worse over time from a gameplay perspective (especially as heroes became more and more important over actual players) and the toxicity in the community (which has never ever been successfully curbed) is the worst of any community in any PC game ever. Literally ever, and I played Heroes of Newerth.
In terms of where it was. I'm more speaking to it's ability to monetize a hardcore dedicated fanbase (as opposed to trying to appeal to a much bigger casual fanbase).
Besides let's be real about Autochess and the way it has pushed the most recent surge of new players.
Autochess???????? The pro scene too has been good at driving interest. But that doesn't really mean the game has improved?
Well, when the time will come I'll love to be nicely surprised, believe me.
Right now, going with their recent track record, I tend to go under the assumption that Valve simply doesn't have (anymore) the know-how or at very least the workflow suited to commit to a "big production" form start to finish, and most of their prototypes will end with countless delays and/or a cancellation down the line.
Do you realize Autochess is there because DOTA 2 improved with tools to make stuff like this happen?
Wait dont worry, you are right, Valve is lazy and made dota worse
Yep and Blizzard created DotA and should get all credit for it. That's how that works. Congrats valve on inventing autochess. You were great at making games and i was wrong
man i love valve threads
some people hate valve so much for not making more single player games that they deliver full-blown hyperbole without as much as a flinch
User Banned (1 Day): Antagonizing other users.
Clarified over and over (and over) again that this was from a "make the game fun to play" perspective and not a financial perspective, but the same 20 people that bootlick Valve in every single thread can't resist. Worse than Nintendo fans lmao
thanks for the post
it's what I had guessed. personally I'm a huge believer in the life proverb "where there's smoke, there's fire"
in this case, I suspected there was some basis in truth to some parts. but there was also some exaggeration / dramatization like you stated
Yeah, you are wrong. Valve improved DOTA, it gave it modes, best battle pass in the business and tools to the community. Fact is the game still is on the top of concurrent players on Steam.
what in the ever living fuck are you talking about???
DOTA 2 has made a shitload of money for Valve as a product
just because it's not the type of product/monetization you personally want, doesn't mean jack shit in reference to if it's been successful or not
just because YOU personally don't like the game, doesn't mean shit. you're only one person and people have different tastes. what matters is if it's overall successful as a product
And that fact is great for Valve's bottom line, and for the people financially invested in the company. Why people can't seem to separate that that is not the same thing as making fun, good games is baffling to me. Like Platinum games flop all the time but they fucking rule, so they're a good developer lmao. Valve makes cash printing monsters that aren't very fun to play.
Valve announced they would ship a VR game this year and people just shrugged.
500k~+ players, hundreds of thousands of viewers every major tournament. and the game has been out for nearly 8 years now
the vast majority of games don't have that kind of lifespan
but yeah if you arbitrarily define "getting off the ground" as having a growing playerbase after almost a decade, valve have definitely failed
lol
Fact the game is great for the millions of people that play the game every day after 7 years.
Feels like I'm talking to walls here, multiple walls who will never ever understand that "making lots of money and having a huge playerbase" is not the same thing as "being fun". I bet you guys also say that MCU movies can't possibly be bad because they made the most money? What a boring and worthless way to view games lmao.
I wasn't a fan of the initial 7.0 launch either, but I really don't understand what you meant by "getting off the ground" and diminishing it as a mod. The base gameplay concepts are already genius, did you want them to completely remake the game or something? There's always been shit patches (I remember the original Centaur and Drow reworks in 6.76. If it wasn't fun to begin with, Dota 2 wouldn't exist in the first place.
Is Valve seen as a place by upcoming developers to want to work at? I assume any new hires have skills that Valve are actively looking for, but for anyone relatively new to the industry, what would they expect to make during their time there?
When it comes to games it kinda feels like they gone from being innovators, to being reactive. It'll certainly be interesting to see what they do with VR though.
When it comes to games it kinda feels like they gone from being innovators, to being reactive. It'll certainly be interesting to see what they do with VR though.
Yeah to be clear, I love the classic DotA gameplay. And I played it a TON of Dota 2 early and really loved it, but I just don't like the direction the game has gone, and it's really turned me off the game as a whole. I will say I've been prone to snap judgements (like how 7.06 (i think that was the one) sort of instantly improved a lot of the stuff that went wrong gameplay wise from 7.0 but I still just wanted off the ride.
It's like Overwatch. Super fun game, great base concepts, cool as hell, but overall the meta has slowly creeped to something that just isn't very fun to play. That is, in my eyes, a failure on Blizzard's part. Other people may love Overwatch now and the direction it's gone in, and that's totally fine, it's just bad in my eyes.
One person saying "this game is fun" and someone else saying "no its not I dont like it"
is literally the basis for all discussion of all art ever made. It's dumb, but that's opinions for you. And it's still better than "this is good because it made money. 700,000 concurrent players can't be wrong! Also Avatar is the best movies ever made. It's proven by science."
I'm totally fine with people loving Dota 2, CSGO, Steam.......... hell, you can be the biggest Artifact fan in the world if you want! (okay maybe not that). I just have other opinions about the quality of their recent output. If you want to say "oh actually Artifact is a super fun game because x" or "DOTA 2 has really improved actually because of x, y, and z" I'm totally willing to hear that. I disagree but that's totally fine. Saying "you're wrong because they make money!" is just really weird and pointless to me.
Your posts make no sense and it seems like you can't grasp that valve does make good games even if you don't like them. Heck I don't like DOTA 2 but that doesn't mean it's not a good game just that it's not for me, It is a wildly successful game that many people love.
That's what opinions are. I think Dota 2 is a bad game because I don't like it? That's like............. I mean that's like the whole basis of what an opinion is. I didn't say it was unsuccessful. GTAV makes money on money but I think the multiplayer is bad, because I don't like it. I don't really see why everything has to be "well I don't like this game but it's objectively good because other people like it". That type of discussion basically flattens any meaningful criticism. Again, I've never said that anyone else is evil or stupid or anything for disagreeing with me.