181–190 of 211 posts
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It's a great pitch. Sounds like a utopia.
I have friends that work there, it is a great place to work, but not without it's problems.
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As some with a gaming PC, a few VR headsets, and a steam deck, I find myself reaching for the steam deck most often. It’s a good enough experience and easy to just turn on and play. The friction to getting the VR headset out is surprisingly high so it really only happens when I’m playing with a friend, which only three friends have headsets. So it just ends up not happening.
I don't quite understand this. The friction on ordinary desktop PC gaming is also fairly high. I can't imagine playing on Quest 2 or 3 is significantly more complicated. Also, if you are playing a large RPG (like Asgards Wrath 2), a few minutes of setup won't make much of a difference in playing time. I agree it's a different issue for more casual games. I think the more relevant difference is that there are vastly m…
I personally believe that VR of the arm swinging/interactive variety will never be widely adopted due to the cost of real estate in the tech savvy, trend-setting consumer population centers.
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I pretty much have the opposite feeling about Deadlock after putting 200+ hrs into it (not that much but enough to understand the game). There was a recent streamer that said it best: the game design fundamentally punishes you for engaging with other players. Instead, it rewards you for running around the map breaking static entities (boxes, statues, static creeps, etc.). Which is, frankly, boring. There's just no wa…
For me I cannot play team based games where you are punished for leaving. Nothing is worse being stuck in a game where you are not having fun and you are forced to keep playing or be punished otherwise. Also, I am no longer a 20 year old with no responsibilities and sometimes things come up where I would need to leave the game. I guess I am just getting older now and no longer play 20 hours a weeks of video games, bu…
> Nothing is worse being stuck in a game where you are not having fun and you are forced to keep playing or be punished otherwise.
It works approximately the same irl for board games or sports. If you just walk off the court in a basketball game because you're not having fun, everyone else will be pissed. Ditto if you just ditch a board game session midway through.
It's funny you mention age, because I have essentially the opposite take. Ditching a match for a game you like because that particular match isn't going well is immature; I'd expect someone older to handle themselves better than someone younger, not throw a fit.
Now of course there are some games where it's fine for people to jump in and out, they're designed around that, but just like with other sorts of games, it's hard to get competitive matches that way.
>Valve is flat. It’s our shorthand way of saying that we don’t have any management > Team leads Often, someone will emerge as the “lead” for a project. This person’s role is not a traditional managerial one. Most often, they’re primarily a clearinghouse of information. They’re keeping the whole project in their head at once so that people can use them as a resource to check decisions against. The leads serve the team…
The main criticism of flat organizational structure is that management will develop as an emergent property anyway, but it will do so poorly. "The Tyranny of Structurelessness is the classic essay on the subject: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
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I'm very scared about the future though. What happens when Gabe is gone? The entire PC Gaming industry is essentially locked in to a single platform. If Steam decided to charge $10/mo people have so much invested into their libraries they would likely do it. What about $20 or $30 per month? I'm not sure why Steam always seems to be exempt from the "perils of digital ownership" arguments
People would go back to piracy. Exactly as that famous quote says, currently Steam is the better product, but if Valve would go rogue, that could change easily. > If Steam decided to charge $10/mo If you think about games already purchased I suspect that would be illegal in many parts of the world.
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I tried VR once, with a bunch of short 360° documentaries and video games like Beat Saber and Half Life Alyx. It was incredible, far beyond any immersion one could ever create on a conventional screen, even with the best ray tracing in the world. I don't really understand why VR helmets they aren't more successful. My first guess is that any console needs exclusive high-profile games to be successful, and producing m…
VR is immersive, but it’s hard to fit in to life and there’s a limited array of content available. You can easily use a computer, watch TV or play video games while still being somewhat present with the people around you in reality. VR makes that impossible: you cannot see them, and they cannot see what you see (so even the experience of watching someone play is gone). Furthermore, this makes the experience hard to s…
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Also, sometimes you need to first be a bit inefficient and lax in order to later come up with really good ideas and solutions.
IMO it’s really hard to argue with the quality valve software is putting out. I can’t really name a game that isn’t considered a must play that they’ve made
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 conti…
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 was not as obvious when it first came out as we were less familiar with stealth marketing. When smart people say ads don’t work on them - this is a counterexample. It’s just that different groups respond to different branding. And this was highly tuned to Reddit interests.
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…