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Valve runs its massive PC gaming ecosystem with only about 350 employees
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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Yep. But it also seems like people are so shocked by the data that maybe they're missing the moral of this story, too? ...sure it's impressive that Valve has done so much with such a small workforce, but I think the reason they've been able to move so quickly is because they have such a small workforce. Companies get slow because they get big...I don't care how much you tout your SAFe processes; you will always lose efficiency as you grow. It's the difference between steering a canoe vs a cruise ship...the more you grow, the more you have to fight against momentum. So, my takeaway from this is that they figured out the secret to continued success as a maturing company, and good for them.
Now, I say all of this with sincere hopes that they don't work their smaller number of employees to death and ask them to take on inappropriately burdensome workloads. Because if that's the case, they should fuck right off with the rest of their peers.
From what I understand, they basically have a very open work structure. People are free to work on what they want, when they want. They actually are against high workloads and do everything they can to prevent employee burnout.
Source
I can't say if that extends beyond the development teams to other departments like server management, but everything I've ever seen about them says they're all just in it to have fun, make cool shit now and then, and of course make tons of money. The fact that their sales platform basically just prints money helps support that culture, obviously.
It didn’t work out
That's a bummer, but also not entirely surprising when you consider Half-Life 3...
Yeah it’s great to think letting your employees do what they want is good, which it is, but yeah everyone’s going to have their own idea and want to work on it. So who gets funding, etc.
It’s strange the person said they move fast, that’s not something I’ve ever heard in reference to steam/valve before, and so many upvotes? What’s going on here.
I think it speaks to developing for gaming over developing for infrastructure. What does it say about gaming where, a company that has a healthy attitude about work in general, has staff that prefer to work on addressing Steam bugs over working on a prestige game?
Do they? They have some pretty buggy and downright unplayable games due to griefers for years now so how is that even remotely true? And I’m sure their employees would rather build something new than to keep fixing old stuff, who wants that? That’s a pretty weird claim to say people prefer.
It’s like people bury their heads and ignore everything bad about steam/valve.
Steam/valve/newall seems to have this weird thing on lemmy, every other billionaire is cancer, but all hail GabeN, can’t have a discussion about anything here it seems without it getting derailed by people with rose glasses on.
And did you read anything posted? What’s “healty” about anything from my screen grab?
TF2 got bot-free recently. Let's see how it lasts.
If the alternative is making a half life 3 that people don’t have the passion for then imo it’s working.
Or there’s not enough people with passion, since their passion is hats, or the higher ups have their preferred people they give funding too, part of the linked articles mention this stuff.
I don’t want forced passion. If an artists doesn’t want to create, they shouldn’t be forced.
So is game making an art form, I think so.
Great, than do that somewhere else and someone else can take their place and do their art under structure.
Who said forcing? Some people just want to draw, while others do only want to draw hats. If you only want to draw hats and we need someone who will draw something else, and there’s 30 of them, yeah that’s an issue dude.
Valve admitted it didn’t work, it’s weird the length people go to defend it.
They never fully abandoned it tho
That is absolutely fascinating, kinda disappointing, and a really good find.
This is such a simple idea that people seem incapable of understanding
Big companies can't innovate. They're pulled in too many directions and create bureaucracies that stifle the individuality needed to push beyond known techniques. At best, they can iterate and imitate - and even that is very hit or miss
There's this idea companies must grow or die - but in reality, companies grow until they can only perpetuate themselves. They start to only make sense on paper
Individuals drive progress - they need time and autonomy
your explanation brought to mind the design ideals behind the RISC (reduced instruction set computer) CPU architecture. Less complexity means higher throughput.
Hope its not a shitty simile lol
Your point about agility is valid but Valve hasn’t veered and pivoted their way to success. Their core model and service have stayed pretty consistent for many years now. And while a cruise ship can’t steer quickly, it can move a hell of a lot more people much faster than a canoe. They are just getting a lot done with very few people and it’s 100% worth of remark. I’d love to hear more about how they do it.
they take the whole company to hawaii most years iirc.
Valve has done so much ?
Steam hasn't been improved since 2012.
They're clearly coasting.
They're keeping their keeping the 30% cut and running away with it instead of hire people to fix stuff.
Since 2012:
That's just what I remember off the top of my head. I'm sure there's more that I just don't care about.
Remote Play Together is another big one for many, I've used it together with Retroarch, so much fun.
Oh yeah, and I didn't mention Steam Family sharing or whatever it's called now. And Steam Link.
Proton and Steam Input are biggest. And while Proton is built on shoulders of giants(wine), Steam Input is something that didn't exist.
Hell i use steam for proton and linux. It really makes gaming so much easier than other services
So what. It works fine for me.