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

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

#121

Post by xigency »

Bjartr wrote: post #118
xigency wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We were having a difficult time recruiting folks. We would interview very talented people but they would be rejected by the old timers at Valve as not fitting the culture." This sounds like a terrible environment to develop in.

If done "right" it could also maintain an environment that is excellent to develop in iif you do fit in the culture.

This quote was talking about the Steam Box team, a hardware team that was an enclave inside of a software company. It sounds really hokey for this team developing new hardware to be unable to bring in necessary talent for whatever reason.

It might be different if the new hires did have day-to-day work with these old software or video game developing fogies.

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

#123

Post by aphextron »

Pinatubo wrote: post #122

The "flat structure" at Valve reminds me of the"unlimited vacation" policy at Netflix. It sounds liberating, but also offers the potential for employees to be judged by rules that are no longer clearly spelled out.

"Unlimited PTO" Is a hallmark of most tech companies. And yeah, it's total bullshit. Give me my 4 weeks a year and let me take them without any judgement, thank you.

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

#124

Post by AimHere »

Keyframe wrote: post #112
AimHere wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it's much more that Valve is an insanely lightweight company for it's customer base. It has something like 330 employees servicing 100 million customers on the go-to PC gaming platform, and a lot of those employees are working on shiny tech and new games. As a comparison, Rockstar North's facility in Edinburgh has roughly the same employee count (slightly more by Wikipedia's count), and all they do is put o…

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.

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

#125

Post by izacus »

AimHere wrote: post #84
frik wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> shiny tech and new games You mean Half Life with it's last full iteration from 10 years ago, and the second episode with a cliffhanger from 2009? Or the Source engine (HL2) which evolved from GoldSource (HL1) which was based on Quake 1 engine (with some parts from Quake 2 engine) - even the Call of Duty engine which aged well too is based on the more modern Quake 3 engine, and I wouldn't consider it shiny in 2016.…

It's a bit disingenuous to just mention Half Life, although note that work on Half Life series games was still ongoing as of last year (and they did a fair amount of work on the whole series in ~2012/2013 porting it to other operating systems). Those 'blank' 10 years saw the release of Left 4 Dead 1/2, Team Fortress 2, Portal 1/2 and CSGO, for instance, as well as that 'little' Dota2 (which is clearly a large game by…

None of the "blank" games are Valve's IPs but acquisitions which kind of stopped in development or releases after Valve acquisition. Half-Life was their last original IP and even that ended in a complete cliff hanger with Episode 3 or sequel nowhere to be found.

It seems that Valve has serious problems actually pushing their games to completion since they started printing money with Steam and pressure to actually release went away.

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

#126

Post by runeks »

localhost wrote: post #65
sebastianbk wrote: post #11

As a Microsoft employee I am so happy that we got rid of stack ranking a few years ago. It encourages a bad behavior and goes against helping your coworkers with whom you are essentially competing for compensation. I am surprised to see that a company like Valve, which seems to be held in high regard by many developers in the industry, still operates with this compensation system. It's system of the 80's if you ask m…

At any company (Microsoft included) where performance-based compensation exists, there is a budget for that line item. Therefore it is a zero-sum game - to pay someone more because of their performance, that means that someone else gets less (or zero) from that line item. So, depending on how you interpret the term "stack ranking", you can either look at it as "forced removal of the bottom x% of the company" or "peop…

    > At any company (Microsoft included) where performance-based 
    > compensation exists, there is a budget for that line item.
I'd like to point out that it's possible to pay bonuses out of profits, rather than a fixed, yearly pre-allocated pool. If employees are only paid a bonus when they add to company profits, there is no competition for bonus funds between employees. So for example, if you have a great idea that saves the company 30% on something, you get half of that saving/profit, or something similar.

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

#127

Post by antnisp »

sebastianbk wrote: post #11

As a Microsoft employee I am so happy that we got rid of stack ranking a few years ago. It encourages a bad behavior and goes against helping your coworkers with whom you are essentially competing for compensation. I am surprised to see that a company like Valve, which seems to be held in high regard by many developers in the industry, still operates with this compensation system. It's system of the 80's if you ask m…

You will be horrified to learn that there is a push to write stack ranking for all public employees into the constitution of Greece.

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

#128

Post by AimHere »

izacus wrote: post #125
AimHere wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit disingenuous to just mention Half Life, although note that work on Half Life series games was still ongoing as of last year (and they did a fair amount of work on the whole series in ~2012/2013 porting it to other operating systems). Those 'blank' 10 years saw the release of Left 4 Dead 1/2, Team Fortress 2, Portal 1/2 and CSGO, for instance, as well as that 'little' Dota2 (which is clearly a large game by…

None of the "blank" games are Valve's IPs but acquisitions which kind of stopped in development or releases after Valve acquisition. Half-Life was their last original IP and even that ended in a complete cliff hanger with Episode 3 or sequel nowhere to be found. It seems that Valve has serious problems actually pushing their games to completion since they started printing money with Steam and pressure to actually rel…

> None of the "blank" games are Valve's IPs but acquisitions which kind of stopped in development or releases after Valve acquisition.

TF2, CSGO and Dota 2 are regularly, and visibly updated constantly. In no way are these moribund or 'stopped in development'; the latter two are still among the most played and watched competitive games online.

It's also stretching things to say that Valve 'acquired' Portal and it was dropped 'after acquisition', since Valve essentially bought the team that made a small gameplay prototype and fleshed out the mechanic into two full-fledged AAA games.

So that just leaves 'Left 4 Dead', which was a case of Valve buying a company, publishing it's game and then putting out a full-on sequel. Given how similar L4D2 was to L4D1 (to the point where the first game was essentially contained inside the second, and there was even a threatened boycott by fans), would it really have been a smart move to make a third so soon?

Sure, it's been, what, three years since the last full game release by Valve. That's quite a long time, and there is no doubt less pressure to release sooner because they're sitting on their money-printing machine, but that sort of timeframe isn't exactly unprecedented in this business. The Rockstar studio I mentioned is on a 5-7 year turnaround for it's one main title - though it does aid and abet Rockstar's other studios.

I suspect part of what's going on is that Valve is uber PR-conscious these days, given it's position in the market and can afford to be a ultra-conservative about quality control (though hopefully not in game design) in any new game it's going to put out.

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

#129

Post by Kurtz79 »

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.

His point is that probably just GTA5 has sold more copies in 5 years than all Valve games combined (a quick check of the most popular ones, HL 1/2, L4D 1/2, Portal 1/2 reaches about 30 mils), so that number of employees is justified.

Also:

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/gta-5s-online-mode-has-gene...

There is no denying Valve does great with the number of people it has, but of all the badly managed companies they could be compared to, Rockstar really it is not a good example...

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

#130

Post by Det_Jacobian »

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 (including and subsuming Vive), and not much else. People that have joined Valve expecting to develop games there end up fired in less than a year, which surely is destructive but also serves a real purpose of perpetuating the Valve culture. A major shakeup is unlikely to happen; Gabe seems to be unable to decide whether he wants to be a super-public figure that is the face and decision body behind the whole company, or if he wants to shrink into a hole and rub shoulders with tech legends hoping to determine the future of everything. The company will make money for a while, but they are open to platform disruption, even in their VR space where they have (more than Oculus) tried to be the open platform. Eventually the market will figure out that they don't need to pay Steam 30% of sales to host files on a server. If this view is right right, Steam is about to find out that the PC world wants to be even more open than they are offering. Of course, the board of investors will certainly find a way to use Valve's intellectual capital regardless of whether they stay on top.

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