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Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]

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Re: Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]

#151

Post by Keyframe »

AimHere wrote: post #124
Keyframe wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rockstar North's facility in Edinburgh has roughly the same employee count (slightly more by Wikipedia's count), and all they do is put out one new game every 5 years or so. All they did was recreate a city full of assets and added game mechanics to it in five years and made the most expensive (at the time) game product in history with more than 1000 people involved in production and the fastest selling entertainment…

What's your point? Valve put out multiple AAA games in the same timeframe too, and did a lot of other stuff besides. Sure, GTA5 is a big-ass game, but Valve's games - games plural - haven't exactly been small projects either.

DCC of assets for something like GTA is magnitudes larger than anything Valve does.

Rockstar has an army of artists working on those assets for that game. Valve is a multidisciplinary house where they dabble in a lot of stuff, split in smaller groups, but their primary vehicle is Steam and a couple of (successful) games where each project does not need as many people. It's comparing apples to oranges.

What Rockstar does demands an army of artists. If Valve were to do same type of game world, they would have an army also. They do not do the same thing though.

If Rockstar were to do what Valve does, they would also have a number of people split into smaller teams working on their own things. They do not do the same thing though.

That's why you can't say it's all Rockstar does with same number of people. Those people are not the same skill and those projects are not the same.

Rockstar's yield, if you're comparing the game industry, is a level above Valve. It's a level above most. It's really not a good example to compare to. They are on the leading edge of what they do. An area Valve isn't in. Maybe if you've compared Avalanche Studios and Just Cause 3. They had 75 core-member team in a studio of 250 and, who knows how many, outsourced people.

Re: Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]

#152

Post by arjunnarayan »

zump wrote: post #142
gavanwoolery wrote: post #135

I researched Valve quite a bit before applying there (I did not get in, but one of their senior team members wrote me a nice message). Some interesting bits I found: - The average engineer there makes at least $400k/year with bonuses, although it could be much more (or less, if they somehow wind up in a bad project). IIRC Valve makes around $2m of profit for every head in the company (they only have ~300 employees or…

> 400k Holy shit.

That doesn't surprise me in the least. you might want to read this: http://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/

Dan Luu's numbers are very conservative - keep in mind that the kind of people who get hired at Valve are far above the bar that Dan Luu sets for the "not particularly unsuccessful" senior engineer.

Re: Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]

#153

Post by cloakandswagger »

teen wrote: post #150
Det_Jacobian wrote: post #130

So Valve is definitely idealized by people outside (and inside) the game industry, but definitely much less so by people who have worked there. The flat structure is sort of a pipe dream that leaves nobody actually in charge of important decisions, while hiding a de facto power structure that certainly exists despite being non-explicit. The company has transitioned to being the company that owns Steam as a platform (…

> not much else steam vr? dota 2? csgo? virtual economies? source 2? the steam workshop? the crowdfunded compendiums?

Dota 2 and CS:GO are the only titles Valve has put out in some time, and I'd argue they're not the best examples.

Valve has been throwing money and man-hours at Dota 2 relentlessly, but the game's playerbase is still tiny compared to LoL. I imagine they have only a couple more years to try to figure this out before the gaming zeitgeist moves away from traditional MOBAs completely.

CS:GO has been in an alternating state of either complete neglect or completely tone-deaf changes. Most patches from recent memory have been despised by the community and quickly reverted. The game seems to be the red-headed stepchild of Valve properties, run by a skeleton crew of people who don't really understand the game.

Meanwhile, Blizzard just blew the doors off the market by revitalizing a game format that Valve invented. I suspect there is a huge internal struggle at Valve right now to determine whether the company will be a content producer or a platform.

Re: Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]

#154

Post by kabuto202 »

cloakandswagger wrote: post #153
teen wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not much else steam vr? dota 2? csgo? virtual economies? source 2? the steam workshop? the crowdfunded compendiums?

Dota 2 and CS:GO are the only titles Valve has put out in some time, and I'd argue they're not the best examples. Valve has been throwing money and man-hours at Dota 2 relentlessly, but the game's playerbase is still tiny compared to LoL. I imagine they have only a couple more years to try to figure this out before the gaming zeitgeist moves away from traditional MOBAs completely. CS:GO has been in an alternating sta…

While I don't know much about CS:GO, you seem to be incredibly ignorant and/or misled on the state of DotA and TF2.

Re: Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]

#155

Post by mwfunk »

serge2k wrote: post #138
gavanwoolery wrote: post #135

I researched Valve quite a bit before applying there (I did not get in, but one of their senior team members wrote me a nice message). Some interesting bits I found: - The average engineer there makes at least $400k/year with bonuses, although it could be much more (or less, if they somehow wind up in a bad project). IIRC Valve makes around $2m of profit for every head in the company (they only have ~300 employees or…

> In spite of the seemingly ideal flat organization, Why does this seem ideal? A flatter hierarchy is almost always preferable, but taken to an extreme it seems like inevitable chaos.

Agreed. When I hear people talk about how great they think it would be to work in a flat org, they always seem to think that it means they will exist in a meritocracy free of politics where they can use their own judgement about what to do and how to do it. I don't see how it could be anything but the exact opposite of that in every respect, and anecdotally that seems to be the case.

Re: Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]

#156

Post by oldmanjay »

MIKarlsen wrote: post #37

I find the whole "You are a person who spend every waking hour optimizing yourself to become the best YOU you can be"-frame of mind very intimidating. Maybe it's because I'm not american, but even though I like to work with complex issues, I also like a 9-17 job with a decent income, and the ability to go home and relax when I'm not working. And by relax, I don't mean working on side projects, doing volunteer work or…

Do you feel like people should be disallowed from working harder than you to avoid making you feel as if you aren't competing at the highest possible level?

Re: Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]

#157

Post by navbaker »

talmand wrote: post #90
MIKarlsen wrote: post #37

I find the whole "You are a person who spend every waking hour optimizing yourself to become the best YOU you can be"-frame of mind very intimidating. Maybe it's because I'm not american, but even though I like to work with complex issues, I also like a 9-17 job with a decent income, and the ability to go home and relax when I'm not working. And by relax, I don't mean working on side projects, doing volunteer work or…

>> But playing board games, working out/running or even just watching mindnumbing TV. Maybe not the TV part, I suppose depending on what it is exactly, but the others I would count towards bettering yourself.

You don't have to spend 100% of your time doing "productive" activities. If watching mind numbing TV is what puts you in a flow-like or meditative mind state, do it!

Re: Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]

#158

Post by rl3 »

serge2k wrote: post #137
Det_Jacobian wrote: post #130

So Valve is definitely idealized by people outside (and inside) the game industry, but definitely much less so by people who have worked there. The flat structure is sort of a pipe dream that leaves nobody actually in charge of important decisions, while hiding a de facto power structure that certainly exists despite being non-explicit. The company has transitioned to being the company that owns Steam as a platform (…

> they don't need to pay Steam 30% of sales to host files on a server Publishers have tried to avoid this and people have whined endlessly about how horrible their alternatives are (eg. origin) while steam continues to be a mediocre at best experience.

>... while steam continues to be a mediocre at best experience.

Steam Chat exemplifies this.

Despite the fact it's been around for 12 years, there's no file-based logging capability. When adding mobile clients into the mix, message delivery becomes abysmal. As of nearly a year ago, one rather infuriating bug was introduced that causes chat buffers to sometimes truncate at random.

Add to this a privacy policy[0] that considers none of your private communications to be private:

"Any information that is disclosed in chat, forums or bulletin boards should be considered public information,"

The fact Steam is well north of 100M active users, and yet they allow certain critical aspects of their platform to not only retain their abysmal quality, but even regress—is simply mind boggling.

I don't have enough information to place the blame squarely at the feet of Valve's flat organizational hierarchy, but it seems likely that it's a contributing factor.

[0] http://store.steampowered.com/privacy_agreement/

Re: Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]

#159

Post by navbaker »

Corence wrote: post #88
MIKarlsen wrote: post #37

I find the whole "You are a person who spend every waking hour optimizing yourself to become the best YOU you can be"-frame of mind very intimidating. Maybe it's because I'm not american, but even though I like to work with complex issues, I also like a 9-17 job with a decent income, and the ability to go home and relax when I'm not working. And by relax, I don't mean working on side projects, doing volunteer work or…

Yes, when I began studying CS I got hit with this pressure really hard. It definitely gave me the feeling that I didn't belong in the field. It is like a cousin to Impostor Syndrome. Instead of feeling like I'm incompetent (though that still happens sometimes), I feel like I shouldn't be in the field since I don't care enough about it to work on it more than 40-45 hours a week. Three years into my job, I'm mostly ove…

I love my Windows PC with VirtualBox running any flavor of UNIX I want!

Re: Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]

#160

Post by nice_byte »

kabuto202 wrote: post #154
cloakandswagger wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dota 2 and CS:GO are the only titles Valve has put out in some time, and I'd argue they're not the best examples. Valve has been throwing money and man-hours at Dota 2 relentlessly, but the game's playerbase is still tiny compared to LoL. I imagine they have only a couple more years to try to figure this out before the gaming zeitgeist moves away from traditional MOBAs completely. CS:GO has been in an alternating sta…

While I don't know much about CS:GO, you seem to be incredibly ignorant and/or misled on the state of DotA and TF2.

I don't play TF2 much these days, but from what I've been hearing/reading, a lot of people in the community are dissatisfied with the recent update and yes, some are leaving TF2 to play Overwatch.
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