Sounds like he's not really in charge anymore or doesn't care what's happening. He's rich. Valve used to make my favorite games. They've changed.
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A former Valve employee talks about his experience
- Thread starter Soundchaser
- Start date
Sounds like he's not really in charge anymore or doesn't care what's happening. He's rich. Valve used to make my favorite games. They've changed.
Put me in the "I am cynical as fuck anyway..." camp so I never really believed this happy go lucky environment that Valve claimed to be. They may aspire to it but when dealing with people I think some realities are inevitable.
Yeah I bet it isn't seeing as you don't even game on the PC judging from your post history.
How dare you! You better make knee jerk proclamations on how you will not buy any product from Valve ever again based on the twitter thread of some guy you only knew about today.
This sounds draining and tiresome. Could you imagine what would happen if they worked with each other rather than against? What a shit hole.
To those saying this is typical corporate culture, not just at places like this, you are entirely wrong and must work at a horrible corporation. This shit is ridiculous, and Gabe (Valve) is lucky to have created Half-Life and even more lucky the community created Counter Strike because otherwise they would have been dead before Steam was a thing. Also, I don't understand how there are still so many Valve "fanboys" at this point. They have been a shit video game developer for a long time now (yes I know Dota 2 exists) and the fact that they abandoned Half-Life in the middle of its story is not defendable. These tweets, although one-sided, give a good idea as to why they haven't been developing multiple awesome games like they used to.
I feel like profit sharing structure would be best due to the incentive to help the company as a whole do better ie each project needs to be its best.
The problem is that they probably don't feel that this is enough of a goad to whip their employees performance with.
Profit sharing has a separate problem, the team becomes paranoid and resistive to adding more people to the team, as your cut will obviously decrease from adding more people. To be honest, I did royalties a couple times and I think the royalty/profit sharing method isn't worth the time to collect the checks and is pretty much a way to underpay you now and maybe you get lucky and the normal amount you could get paid later shows up.
tbh if you've got the money to pay bonuses then you've got the money to just include it in the damn salaries.
Yeah, kind of funny how Valve is/was held as this lofty promised land of free-running creativity and graceful design. Except that it actually sounds like a corporate hellhole.
Seriously, it sounds awful.
Sure, but I never read into any news story too much things can feel so different when you see it and actaully know what happened and it is one's opinion after all. It's hard to go by, just the same for reviews for me.
I do not want to say he is wrong, but hell if I know like your saying.
I can see having no managers or deadlines to be a perk in some light, but that is only if you treat it like an office job instead of being an artisan.
They actually aren't, there are clear hierarchies, managers, objectives, deadlines and bosses in most workplaces. You are using some bullshit defense "it is everywhere" when every other major studio works under the hierarchy of publishers (corporate), CEO, supervisors, leads, seniors etc. There will be a spectrum of how much freedom and flexibility different corporations have, but nowhere near the wild-west of do what you want working on the projects which take 3 years and 100 manpower to actually deliver.
Sorry for the ignorance but what happened in 1867?
If this has been answered already just point me in the general direction. Thank you :)
Hmmm, this is an interesting thread. Thought I'd add my 2 cents and give some insights into how we've 'organized' Moon Studios, cause what we're doing seems to work well for us, so maybe someone can take something from it.
Generally speaking, we also like to think we're using a 'flat hierarchy', simply cause every voice in the team should matter. For that to work, you need to have someone at the helm who isn't a self-important bozo who thinks his way of doing things is the only way to go. I worked at companies before where good ideas were dismissed simply due to seniority and that's just silly to me.
So we've structured everything into Departments (Art, Animation, Tech, Design, etc.) and while we do have 'Department Leads', we're very cautious to ensure that people who do deal with managerial stuff aren't automatically in a 'higher position' than people who don't (another reason why we don't have 'ranks' in our titles, everyone at Moon is 'just' a 'designer' or a 'programmer' or an 'artist', but we don't specify in peoples titles that 'this person is better than that person'). In a lot of companies, in order to get a raise, you have to take on managerial tasks and to me that never made sense. If you've got an amazing artist who's best served making art and laying out the vision in terms of visuals, you're not doing yourself any favors by now splitting the persons time, forcing him to spend a certain amount of time per week on managing other people just to 'justify' a raise or a new title.
So you've got Department Leads who usually are the more organized folks in your company and they have to take responsibility for the Departments output. On top of that, we do syncup meetings twice a week with every department just so we can course-correct and so that people can speak up if they wanna take things into a different direction, if they have ideas they wanna push through or need help in some way to accomplish their tasks. Once a week we do a Weekly Team Sync where all the departments come together and that's where we usually discuss milestones, check whether we're on track or not and just generally have a very open discussion on how we'll handle the upcoming week.
On top of that, I'm sorta the 'Creative Director' at Moon, which means I'm reviewing everything non-Tech-related and we've got Gennadiy who's doing the same thing for Tech-related tasks. We're the ones that have to make sure that the projects are on track and I'm also still right there in the trenches with everyone doing design work, level designs, prototypes, etc.
This 'structure' seems to work nicely for us - We started Moon as a 2-person team and grew organically. It was always super important to us that we don't turn into a corporation where people might be disparaging to one another, where politics can affect your career (I'm allergic to brown-nosers), it's all a meritocracy where hopefully people always present their work to one another and can inspire each other. Everyone also has access to everything, everyone can play our builds and give feedback and have a say at any time. That obviously doesn't mean that every single thing a person brings up will automatically make it into the game, but at least you know that you've been heard and your suggestions are being considered by the respective departments. And if you really wanna push things through, you have plenty of opportunities to convince everyone else that your way is the way to go.
Now, of course I can't claim that we're doing a perfect job. Whenever people work together, there's always going to be a certain level of miscommunication, etc., but I think the goal should be that you strive for everyone to be able to do their jobs in the most efficient manner and feel happy with the job they're doing. It also helps that we're usually working on projects that we're all super passionate about - I don't think our structure would work if the games we'd be making wouldn't be passion projects. And I think our structure only works for smaller teams. We're currently 50 people and things are still manageable, but I'm pretty sure things would have to be organized differently if we'd grow to 100-150. Scale is a huge issue when it comes to how you manage a company and I think at some point when you've grown too much you might just lose touch with what exactly is going on at the studio. I think if people feel like we're all a big family and we do everything to just let them do their work, good things will come out of that and so far that's been a winning strategy for us :)
Generally speaking, we also like to think we're using a 'flat hierarchy', simply cause every voice in the team should matter. For that to work, you need to have someone at the helm who isn't a self-important bozo who thinks his way of doing things is the only way to go. I worked at companies before where good ideas were dismissed simply due to seniority and that's just silly to me.
So we've structured everything into Departments (Art, Animation, Tech, Design, etc.) and while we do have 'Department Leads', we're very cautious to ensure that people who do deal with managerial stuff aren't automatically in a 'higher position' than people who don't (another reason why we don't have 'ranks' in our titles, everyone at Moon is 'just' a 'designer' or a 'programmer' or an 'artist', but we don't specify in peoples titles that 'this person is better than that person'). In a lot of companies, in order to get a raise, you have to take on managerial tasks and to me that never made sense. If you've got an amazing artist who's best served making art and laying out the vision in terms of visuals, you're not doing yourself any favors by now splitting the persons time, forcing him to spend a certain amount of time per week on managing other people just to 'justify' a raise or a new title.
So you've got Department Leads who usually are the more organized folks in your company and they have to take responsibility for the Departments output. On top of that, we do syncup meetings twice a week with every department just so we can course-correct and so that people can speak up if they wanna take things into a different direction, if they have ideas they wanna push through or need help in some way to accomplish their tasks. Once a week we do a Weekly Team Sync where all the departments come together and that's where we usually discuss milestones, check whether we're on track or not and just generally have a very open discussion on how we'll handle the upcoming week.
On top of that, I'm sorta the 'Creative Director' at Moon, which means I'm reviewing everything non-Tech-related and we've got Gennadiy who's doing the same thing for Tech-related tasks. We're the ones that have to make sure that the projects are on track and I'm also still right there in the trenches with everyone doing design work, level designs, prototypes, etc.
This 'structure' seems to work nicely for us - We started Moon as a 2-person team and grew organically. It was always super important to us that we don't turn into a corporation where people might be disparaging to one another, where politics can affect your career (I'm allergic to brown-nosers), it's all a meritocracy where hopefully people always present their work to one another and can inspire each other. Everyone also has access to everything, everyone can play our builds and give feedback and have a say at any time. That obviously doesn't mean that every single thing a person brings up will automatically make it into the game, but at least you know that you've been heard and your suggestions are being considered by the respective departments. And if you really wanna push things through, you have plenty of opportunities to convince everyone else that your way is the way to go.
Now, of course I can't claim that we're doing a perfect job. Whenever people work together, there's always going to be a certain level of miscommunication, etc., but I think the goal should be that you strive for everyone to be able to do their jobs in the most efficient manner and feel happy with the job they're doing. It also helps that we're usually working on projects that we're all super passionate about - I don't think our structure would work if the games we'd be making wouldn't be passion projects. And I think our structure only works for smaller teams. We're currently 50 people and things are still manageable, but I'm pretty sure things would have to be organized differently if we'd grow to 100-150. Scale is a huge issue when it comes to how you manage a company and I think at some point when you've grown too much you might just lose touch with what exactly is going on at the studio. I think if people feel like we're all a big family and we do everything to just let them do their work, good things will come out of that and so far that's been a winning strategy for us :)
There is an adjunct problem in that salaries are somewhat dicey to determine in a flat structure. From what I understand, at Valve a person's salary is determined by committee, if they want a raise then they have to lobby for it. They must have felt that they needed a more direct mechanism to bypass some of that bureaucracy via bonuses.
Das Kapital by Karl Marx was published in 1867. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx'...n#Alienation_of_the_worker_from_their_product
I've always suspected Valves structure was a bit flawed, but bloody hell. This ambiguity and anxiety adds to a culture which, based on a lawsuit (that I haven't heard much about recently), sounds harassing and transphobic. Crunch culture is still here, despite the surface-level fluidity.
Btw for people wondering about the aforementioned lawsuit -
https://www.polygon.com/platform/am...r-employee-lawsuit-transgender-discrimination
Btw for people wondering about the aforementioned lawsuit -
https://www.polygon.com/platform/am...r-employee-lawsuit-transgender-discrimination
Its almost like the company handbook that reeked of shit all those years ago was a big farce to make valve not seem like a poorly managed company.
Perfectly encapsulates why games like TF2 remove features or ones get broken completely without a fix.
Perfectly encapsulates why games like TF2 remove features or ones get broken completely without a fix.
Just ends up making the person(s) responsible for the bonus review or the criteria for the bonus the kingmaker. It's pretty clear that Valve has gone completely off the rails as a creative studio and has instead morphed into an entity that chases maximum revenue at all costs. The paid mods fiasco was a huge sign. For a privately held company that now has zero money worries, their recent behavior is more than a little weird.
The fact that Valve's management structure, or lack thereof, has massively damaged its ability to put out content over the years was telling enough. We've heard stories like this for a while now....this isn't new info at all. No one who has been following industry news for the past few years should be surprised or skeptical of these tweets, tbh
Thank you for your insight. I like that you questioned the reasoning behind most companies tying pay raises to extra managerial responsibility, which I can see stifling creativity as well as productivity in your most inspired designers. I honestly think it comes down to the attitude and role model set out by the people at the very top. If the founders of the company are jerks, then that attitude will naturally trickle down.
I can't pretend to know what's up at Valve, but something's telling me that jerks are currently holding positions of greater power in that company, and it could be poisoning the well. Poor beaureocratic policy notwithstanding.
Thank you for your insight. I like that you questioned the reasoning behind most companies tying pay raises to extra managerial responsibility, which I can see stifling creativity as well as productivity in your most inspired designers. I honestly think it comes down to the attitude and role model set out by the people at the very top. If the founders of the company are jerks, then that attitude will naturally trickle down.
I can't pretend to know what's up at Valve, but something's telling me that jerks are currently holding positions of greater power in that company, and it could be poisoning the well. Poor beaureocratic policy notwithstanding.
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That's wrong because?
I see it differently. How many games has valve released in over 20 years? I think they never care and once they hit the jackpot realized they dropped the pretense.
I can give you my Steam account if you want it has a good amount of games but as i said, i stopped using it sometime ago.
As I recall, the last time he aired some of this dirty laundry some other Valve employees had some stuff to say about the blog post, so I'm going to take it all with a grain of salt.
This is also important to keep in mind.
Given that, do we know what prompted this now? It's a lot of tweets to write just out of the blue.
This is also important to keep in mind.
Given that, do we know what prompted this now? It's a lot of tweets to write just out of the blue.
This was really insightful but these 2 paragraphs especially resonated very strongly with me. The way most companies and the "ladder of success" in general are organized always seemed so archaic to me. Everyone tells you "go study so you can get a management job with good salary" and I'm like no, who in their right mind would want that instead of doing what they love AND having a good salary?
I hope someday the top brass at Activision realizes your talent is wasted on making support tasks for Call of Duty and give you another shot at Transformers. It's long overdue.
My first thought as well. Some of it was overly odd (almost sounded cynical as noted in OP), but most of his ramblings is working in a competitive field where to rise up you have to stand out.
People always backstab/mislead/take credit to get themselves ahead, and it's annoying af, but human nature it seems.
As someone working in a huge corporation Im not really surprised or horrified. People look out for themselves and companys dont care about you, you will be better off accepting these facts and theres not much point being upset over it. All you can do is look for a new job if it makes you unhappy.
Hahaha, that'd be High Moon Studios. We're 'just' Moon, makers of the Ori series :)
I'll never work on Call of Duty, promise!
Ooops, nevermind that. Ori is also a great game. ;)
I should start looking closely at avatars more...
User Warned: Portbegging
You guys are amazing, its super sad Ori isnt on the Switch though.
The amount of work Valve are doing in projects with zero immediate monetary value suggests that you are wrong.
I don't understand this comment. No one ever says, it's super sad Mario isn't on Xbox do they? Microsoft publishes Ori. I'm surprised it's even on Steam.
That's exactly what I was struck by.
This seems like all the horror stories I heard about the old MS.
Huh, good question.
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nobody has ever said nintendo should go third party?
Really?
...really?
Because switch is perfect for indies and platformers, Sony put Crash on it.
Sure, but on top of that, Ori would do gangbusters on Switch but its not gonna move Xbox units on its own so it would make sense, although its highly improbable.
Think about it from the other end, without Microsoft's involvement there might not have been an Ori to want in the first place. Kinda like the Bayonetta 2/3 situation.
Im really thankfull it exists and Im not trying to undermine the game by wishing it was on handheld.
The portbegging on here about the Switch is ... something. Ori is an incredibly high quality game, it would do well on any healthy platform.
This is the type of logic you're using here: fighting games do well on Xbox, maybe Bandai Namco should port Smash to Xbox!
Well, you can see the indie success on the switch for yourself, they sell tons better than on all the other platforms, I wouldnt say its the same at all, Smash is a title that will sell systems like a halo or a gears, different ballpark.
Obviously these tweets are probably a bit dramatic but they do speak to a kernel or truth.
- Cliques are important in the games industry, just like any other career.
- Contractors are 100% second class citizens and are treated like dirt
- Asking questions can get you fired
- Tying lots of money up in bonuses destroys work culture
- Cliques are important in the games industry, just like any other career.
- Contractors are 100% second class citizens and are treated like dirt
- Asking questions can get you fired
- Tying lots of money up in bonuses destroys work culture
Lovely contribution, thanks for that! Between all the "regular" video game discussions and speculation it's often easy to forget actual brilliant devs are among us, and this is one of the most detailed and interesting pieces I've read, considering it doesn't circle around the issues in a PR manner.
It also is in contrast with many of the things in OP, but different companies handle things differently so it makes sense. It seemed obvious to me years ago that Valve's structure would work nicely with a small and passionate team, but expand onto a several hundreds behemoth where billions of dollars are on the line, and it becomes a hellhole where in order to succeed you must assure others perform worse than you, not necessarily by doing a good job, which inevitably leads to antagonism, stress, anxiety, hate, discrimination.
And, well, Valve's output throughout the years really shows this concept nicely. There's basically no such thing as passion projects anymore, if there are they get very minimal resources. The only things that can get proper greenlight are "make money quick" schemes. You won't see a God Of War, a Mario Odyssey or a Sunset Overdrive from these guys anymore, because these guys are in a pit where the only way up is making enormous profit with the least amount of effort. So prepare for more DOTA2 skins, more card games, perhaps Valve's own Battle Royale, more mobile games, new ways to allow users to pay for useless shit and trade them for big money they all get a cut from. I'm not into the "lol those aren't even gamez" circle, but anybody knows how recent Valve projects are relatively low-effort, low-risk, maximum profit products with a lot of rehashed content and an increased focus on continous monetization. Which is too bad, considering these guys made some legendary games in the past - then again, those who did don't work there anymore, and for a reason.
Again;
if you look at what Valve are actually working on and releasing, this is complete horseshit.
A platform agnostic open VR solution isn't "low effort high reward make money quick no passion" project.
Adding support for controllers of all manufacturers with full remapping tools for free isn't either.
