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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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GoG doesn't work in the same scale or depth that Valve do - and their current client isn't fantastic either. Which they're addressing I get, but the 2.0 beta will run for a long time before getting to the point they envision. My point is, your frustration at which Valve work at really applies to the majority of players on the market. Origin, Uplay have been stagnant for years, Epic need a long time to roll out their basics, and Valve have spent years getting their UI refresh in order. I'm not seeing what makes Valve unique in that regard.
I work in dev, I know what the reality is like - its not that you're facing issues, its the amalgamation of issues that raises a red flag for me. To the point where you consider the w10 client comparable as an experience. This is clearly an outlier experience, and theres nothing wrong in acknowledging as much. I'm not calling you incompetent, I'm saying something wrong is with your PC.
GoG doesn't work in the same scale or depth that Valve do - and their current client isn't fantastic either. Which they're addressing I get, but the 2.0 beta will run for a long time before getting to the point they envision. My point is, your frustration at which Valve work at really applies to the majority of players on the market. Origin, Uplay have been stagnant for years, Epic need a long time to roll out their basics, and Valve have spent years getting their UI refresh in order. I'm not seeing what makes Valve unique in that regard.
I work in dev, I know what the reality is like - its not that you're facing issues, its the amalgamation of issues that raises a red flag for me. To the point where you consider the w10 client comparable as an experience. This is clearly an outlier experience, and theres nothing wrong in acknowledging as much. I'm not calling you incompetent, I'm saying something wrong is with your PC.
Looking at the embarassingly barren stores and launchers on PC i sure am curious what could any person possible drive to say such a thing.
The last time i checked neither GOG the Webstore, nor GOG Galaxy, the Client did even attempt to replicate 90% of steams features, let alone succeeded with "sometimes better results in a fraction of the time"
The interest of the consumer is what dictates their level of success, not their freedom to set an arbitrary date of release. If Valve could guarantee a greater quantity of engagement with your game by giving it a time slot on a revolving release window on the front page, I am sure a lot of devs without any marketing budget would prefer it.
Also, I never asserted my suggestion was a definitive solution. I would have hoped that the multi-billion dollar think tank housing some of the most renowned software engineers in the industry would have accomplished that in almost a decade.
But, here we are!
Having said that, I've seen this in "conventional" companies as well!
It doesn't feel good to have been so right, among the very few vocal minority back in 2006.
I honestly can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not with this. Those companies have made some of the best games ever, which is also why this is such a big deal. They were some of the biggest, and most respected gaming developers and in many ways would influence what the rest would try to follow. They have essentially given up on doing what had made them so cherished in the first place to focus on just making money for the least work possible. No real vision anymore beyond that, gaming be damned and since it's obviously working, and they're making a killing off of the least work for the most pay, that's why "DLC", "GaaS" and lootboxes are the way they are today. It's very smart for business, but extremely disappointing for gaming.
"Vote with your wallet" doesn't really matter if there are millions more who aren't thinking that far ahead, and just want the latest skin on the current game they are playing.
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I'll rephrase it. If 15 games are releasing each day. How do you space that ? That's literally impossible. The current issue in the game market cant be fixed by spacing out.
Whole point is that Valve approach has good and bad sides. It is good for their employees (and Era constantly screams about employees wellbeing) and their focus on customers is good for customers. But because of that other things are sidetracked. But having employees that are in the company 15+ years tells a lot. And people coming back to Valve after they left they is also telling a lot. And there are rare cases like this where employees openly talk about their experiences in the company in real time like Jane does.
They make what they are comfortable to make. Bioware spent 7 "bloody and sweaty" years on Anthem basically for nothing for example. Valve will spend that same time on project but they won't announce it or push people to work until they "die" so they cancel it whenever they want if it doesn't fit their vision and go work on something else.
I'm counting the days until the Campo Santo folks bail, and we can get Idle Thumbs podcasts again.
For a dev, it's kind of amazing that you can ignore almost everything else running like clockwork on a PC, but assume one piece of software is the fault of a Windows configuration or hardware. In IT, it's basic process of elimination. You check the core systems and services, then move on and on until you find an outlier. For me, Steam was just stubborn and did not work correctly.
Issues of varying scale occurred on different rigs. The issue I described about having to terminate the bootstrapper? I reinstalled Steam several times, completely removed all traces of Steam's install with uninstaller tools, did a fresh install of Windows on a day off as an experiment (I am moving into IT soon and find dicking with all the stuff interesting), it remedied nothing. Every other bit of software performed as expected, but not Steam. Later the issue was alleviated with an arbitrary update. I don't know about you, but that sounds like a bizarre software anomaly to me.
They sound like the ideal workplace to me. It seems like some posters are no longer their target demographic and feel they've become a victim of their success due to an unsourced comment? But really, they are making what they want and doing what we all advocate for everyone else, by necessity maybe game development has become too big, too absurd to healthfully do this and sustain the same practices they had during their original games.
I'm awfully excited for the vr games and think that's the most exciting work not dictated by the market that anyone could be focused on. But they may make it the market. We'll see.
I'm awfully excited for the vr games and think that's the most exciting work not dictated by the market that anyone could be focused on. But they may make it the market. We'll see.
If VR isn't considering pushing the medium I dunno what is then. :/
Hey, it's great that Valve offers family friendly benefits like maternity leave. However, good things don't completely negate the bad. A company can do great things while fucking up certain other aspects. It's not just a black and white affair.
Again, it's a solution their talent has to engineer not me. It's their job to take a seemingly impossible task like sorting all that for consumers and make it work. The only suggestion I can make is perhaps a set of revolving tiles on the front page that cycle through each game as a headliner. So let's say there is 7 tiles, one for each day of the week, and there are 15 games. Each game's logo or cover art cycles every 90 minutes. As you bleed into next week, the tile gets replaced with that day's new cycle, so every game gets rotations and eyes for 7 days.
I am sure there is an army of software engineers and logistics people who can tell me I am stupid, but I would make the counter claim that the current system of just bulk releasing and users find them themselves isn't really feasible for healthy discoverability either.
Edit: I only advocated for scheduling as I thought having slices of time where a pre-determined item was in rotation on the front page would do better for devs, sorry if my logic was foggy.
True or not I cannot stand what Valve has become.
What total sellouts.
And yeah I'm aware they're a business and yada yada yada.
What total sellouts.
And yeah I'm aware they're a business and yada yada yada.
Tweets I posted are from Campo Santo member. And from what you can read she really likes working at Valve. So...
The problem with talking about Valve on this particular forum is, in my opinion, its console-focused nature. Many of the people posting here are console gamers, so their main connection to Valve is the games that Valve released on consoles. It has been a long time since Valve released anything on consoles so for a console gamer the company might as well be sitting around twiddling its thumbs for all they know or care. For most PC gamers, the company has been incredibly prolific in more ways than one, but all that work is practically invisible to console gamers that make up the majority of posters here.
In the last ten years, Valve has released the following games:
Left 4 Dead 2
Alien Swarm
Portal 2
Counter-Strike: Global offensive
Dota 2
The Lab
Artifact
7 games in ten years. To be fair, games like Alien Swarm and The Lab are not full titles. Removing those, Valve has released five games over the last ten years, on top of:
Growing Steam into a behemoth in the digital distribution space
Developing hardware (Steam Controller) and operating systems (SteamOS)
Adding features to the client that fundamentally improve PC gaming as a whole (Steam Input, Steam Proton)
Developing VR hardware (Vive, Index) and software (SteamVR/OpenVR, VR games)
Developing God knows what else that we don't know about
The facts don't lie. Anyone arguing that Valve's structure or business strategy isn't working as it should has to provide some sort of fact to support that claim. As far as we know Valve is a company of 300-400 people. Can anyone look at the lists above and claim in good faith that Valve is sitting around doing nothing? But again, if you are a console gamer and the last Valve project that mattered to you was Left 4 Dead 2 ten years ago, you might indeed think that "Valve is doing nothing".
At this point they should be a publisher who handles cosmetics and dlc for titles they produce. If they wont organize for a title and just focus on extras then why fight it? Maximize it and find games to partner that with.
By the way, how is this thread still open ?
Can we really make threads out of random comments from the comment section of any site ?
Can we really make threads out of random comments from the comment section of any site ?
He literally says that they *don't* really get to work on what they want, it's a ruse.
Did you ever consider the big rich think tank knows what theyre doing when they let everything on? You seem dead set that this is ruining everything but it all seems to be fine.
How is that a unique feature? You know Epic Games Store is owned by a private company, right?
I meant unique in the context of having such a great market share and influence on the industry. Not that privately owned storefronts are unique. Most companies with that kind of success get bought up or or go public.
We'll see how Epic Games Store turns out, their situation is a bit different with Tencent owning 40% of the company.
Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhaha do you know who he is??? See if you can sleuth it out. The clues are in the op!
It's fairly significant picking ten years as the cutoff, because they've released one (extremely poorly received) game and one collection of VR demos in the last 6 years.
Valve used to be one of my favorite developers of all time, right alongside Nintendo. Portal 2 has one of the best stories in any game I've ever played, and even the chance that some people at Valve felt that games like Portal 2 weren't worth making anymore is incredibly depressing. I think it's understandable that people aren't happy that Valve has seemingly abandoned fully one half of the style of games (single player narrative games) that made people fall in love with the company in the first place.
I'm still holding out hope that they can salvage things, that the competition from Epic might force them to release more games, Steam exclusives, and that the purchase of Campo Santo will result in more single player, narrative driven games from Valve again (I can't imagine why else they'd buy a studio known specifically for those types of games).
It is heartwarming to see that after the disaster that was Brexit and the last US presidential election, many are still just as welcoming for news affirming their existing view. It really brings tears to my eyes knowing that some still haven't learnt a thing about being critical about any news they hear.
It probably is making Putin smile. Take note, Xi, you still have a chance in taking control of the 2020 election!
Even if this person's opinion is real and they really did work at Steam, to me, it sounded like a disgruntled former employee ranting off because Valve wasn't the place for them, which to be frank, happens all the time, some workplace culture just doesn't click for some.
The concept of rent-seeking may be closer.
Though I'm a big fan of what they've achieved with Linux, so may just be related to their approach to AAA games. Or what this developer imagined himself to be working on when he joined. They're just not in that business anymore.
Do their big games simply predate the AAA concept and their way of working just doesn't scale to that? Must admit most Valve games skipped me by.
The bit you quoted contains the phrase 'game studio'. The context should be extremely obvious. Is Steam a game ?
They don't need to do so to profit, and the omnipresent built up idea of what half life 3/portal 3/ whatever could be has more value to their brand than actually releasing those games.
Yup, it's just so important to "gotcha" that they don't even stop to think a tiny bit more.
" One very senior employee even said that Valve would never make another single player game, because they weren't worth the effort. "Portal 2," he explained, had only made $200 million in profit and that kind of chump change just wasn't worth it, when you could make 100s of millions a year selling digital hats and paintjobs for guns "
Thank god for first party studios and indies that don't have this attitude.
Thank god for first party studios and indies that don't have this attitude.
Working conditions =/= business strategies.
The core of the OP is that Valve deliberately chose to follow monetization strategies rather than nurture the creative side of video game making. If you care more about how companies would like you to spend money on their games/platform that's totally fine but I guess some video gamers prefer to look at other aspects especially considering the fact that Valve was indeed a pretty high-level and innovative developer back then.
Also, working conditions =/= organizational issues.
You can have a permissive and progressive working environment BUT still be under uncertain organizational and managerial dynamics. I worked in an institution that had great benefits and flexible working schedule but heads of departments were fighting with each other and roles were blurred to the point that they were re-organizing departments every 3-4 months causing great confusion and difficulties in working on projects.
I remember reading something like this a couple of years back. It's why I don't longer but games on steam and probably won't for the foreseeable future. They really should get titles with responsibility, a flat structure with invisible seniority is not great for the worker.
You no longer buy games on Steam because they don't have a crunch culture ? You sound like a really pleasant person indeed.
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Yup. It's like people don't understand why these structures got set up in the first place. It's so you can call a spade a spade and actually get something done.
The problem is there is no such thing as a flat structure. It just absolves senior folks that are part of the in crowd from responsibility, it enables them to do whatever they want thats part of the company culture mainstream and to dangle undefinable power over the heads of less senior employees. It's the perfect system to enable abusers and bullies without being able to hold anyone accountable for it.
Where did I write that? The OP had a lot more to say then that. I don't buy games on steam because they are not the same company as they used to be, they don't bring out the games I would like to play, so all they have for me is a service for third parties, and a service I can find somewhere else from companies that brings me the games I would want to play. Me and valve parted ways when they changed their focus as stated in the OP .
Do you think that a flat structure with invisible seniority is a good working environment for the average Joe?
The OP has jackshit to say. The OP isn't based on the article. The OP is based on a COMMENT from the COMMENT SECTION from another site, reacting to that article. What kind of shit is that ?
As for the rest, you're right, they provide a service for 3rd parties with Steam and games you don't like. So your reasonning is "I dont like their games so I dont play ANY 3rd party game from their service". Yet you seem to pop in EGS related threads despite Epic cancelling stuff and relying on Fortnite only. It's almost as if you were transparent.
