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Valve Software handbook for new employees [pdf] (2012)

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21–30 of 211 posts

Re: Valve Software handbook for new employees [pdf] (2012)

#21
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet when current management leaves, as usual happens in these cases, those that worship Valve and Steam will see yet another big corporation, this if it doesn't eventually get acquired.

What management? Gabe doesn't have any direct involvement in the running of the company at this point, in spite of being the majority owner. It's an open question what happens if he leaves or dies but it doesn't seem likely that he'd do anything to intentionally sabotage the company, like sell it off. It's more likely that ownership will transfer to a trusted party or to the employees.

At this point I think Valve is more likely to be disrupted from an outside influence rather than within, I think a lot of their actions are about keeping the ship steady. If someone does come along as an upstart in a new market as valve did with digital distribution versus retail/physical, the old is unlikely to be instantly irrelevant and obsoleted, and even then you get new markets like mobile appearing over their lifespan where both are healthy side-by-side.

Re: Valve Software handbook for new employees [pdf] (2012)

#22
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet when current management leaves, as usual happens in these cases, those that worship Valve and Steam will see yet another big corporation, this if it doesn't eventually get acquired.

What management? Gabe doesn't have any direct involvement in the running of the company at this point, in spite of being the majority owner. It's an open question what happens if he leaves or dies but it doesn't seem likely that he'd do anything to intentionally sabotage the company, like sell it off. It's more likely that ownership will transfer to a trusted party or to the employees.

I would actually be intrigued to know how many companies have shown interest in acquiring Valve over the years that we'll never know about.

Re: Valve Software handbook for new employees [pdf] (2012)

#23

Valve hasn’t released anything of note since this has been published. So I guess we should take these as anti patterns. Valve is more of a hat generation company than a game company so it seems like no one should take any game related advice from them.

Half-Life Alyx, Dota 2, Steam Deck, Index, Proton, CS:GO (released same year as this handbook), and not to mention still dominating with Steam despite the competiton spending hundreds of millions of dollars to not even make a dip in their marketshare.

Counter-strike 2 was also just recently released.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Strike_2

Re: Valve Software handbook for new employees [pdf] (2012)

#25

Chet Faliszek, writer for games like Half-Life and the lead writer for Portal/Portal 2 has since confirmed that this handbook was never given to employees. It was created and released as part of advertising them as an employer.

It's hard to believe that the principles outlined here weren't at least briefly followed when it's featured on their website too: https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/publications, but I'd be an open to a source which substantiates your claim.

However, non-hierarchical structures are often open to manipulation and land-grabbing (see Tyranny of Structurelessness, etc.) so I am also skeptical that a company may have continued with this practice.

Re: Valve Software handbook for new employees [pdf] (2012)

#26
post #13

Surprising amount of discussion on work/life balance and kids/family for a game dev. Is Valve known for this or is it just relative?

Arguably by 2012, Valve was already transitioning out of the game development business and into the services business. Team Fortress 2 was already out, Left 4 Dead 2 was already out, Portal 2 was already out, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive came out in the same year, and Dota 2 came out the next year. Really the only things that have been made since that period are Half-Life: Alyx (2020), Counter-Strike 2 (2023) and Deadlock (TBA).

Re: Valve Software handbook for new employees [pdf] (2012)

#27
Valve gets a lot of heat for slowing down on first party gaming content, but I think Steam has been a net positive for the gaming community. There are certainly some cases where the accessibility has created "noise" and other trouble, but overall I think this is a good thing. Their 30% cut is absolutely justified once you start looking into everything they do for you as a developer and the market that you have access to. It is a lot easier to pay that kind of fee when you don't feel like your technology partners actively hate the fact that you merely exist.

Steam is still like what Netflix used to be. You have pretty much everything you care about in one place. Even big monster AAA developers like EA have given up and put their content on the platform. If I had to pick between having HL3 and a coherent gaming ecosystem, I'd pick the latter.

Re: Valve Software handbook for new employees [pdf] (2012)

#28
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half-Life Alyx, Dota 2, Steam Deck, Index, Proton, CS:GO (released same year as this handbook), and not to mention still dominating with Steam despite the competiton spending hundreds of millions of dollars to not even make a dip in their marketshare.

Counter-strike 2 was also just recently released. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Strike_2

Well, I would categorize that more to major version update than actually new release. Say like new Linux LTS release. Lot of things changed even very deep, but it is basically largely same work.

Re: Valve Software handbook for new employees [pdf] (2012)

#30
post #29
post #3

It would be interesting to see copies of this from subsequent years (this is the 2012 edition) to understand how Valve's process has evolved over time.

This was PR prop

Not just PR prop, stale rehashed PR prop reposted time and time again over 13+ years.
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