Quoting: TrainDoc

Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: TrainDoc

Quoting: Kristian

Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: EikeI can understand frustration there. Imagine you were a software developer working for a cool company with some of the coolest franchises out there - and you're not allowed to work on them, for years, for decades maybe...

As I understand Valve's corporate structure, it's the employees who more or less decide the direction of the company. So it's not like there are a bunch of people champing at the bit to make new games but the bosses won't let them. If enough people got together and decided they wanted to make Half-Life 3, or Portal 3, or whatever, Gabe wouldn't stop them. The real question is why there's no momentum internally to get those projects rolling.

There is the infamous Valve employee handbook [External Link].

Total PR stunt btw. No such document existed before or after and is just a recruiting tool. Valve's problems is it's rockstar developers lead the charge on everything and juniors who don't fall in line risk termination.

At least one former Valve employee has gone on record to say that the handbook is real. However, she does agree with you that there are people within the company who have managed to acquire quite a lot of internal influence which rather defeats the purpose of a flat management structure.

https://www.wired.com/2013/07/wireduk-valve-jeri-ellsworth/ [External Link]

The handbook is real in that exists but not much more. Appreciate you citing the sources that I was too lazy to find myself 😅.

It not only exists (or at least used to exist), but according to that former employee, is actually given to new hires.

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Quoting: SkyGuyWhyValve should just do some jams. You don't need 75 people to make a game, get five, make some gameplay. It's the artsy stuff that takes time - graphics, sound, that stuff. And then all the programmer time spent messing with the engine to support the artsy things.

Gameplay though? Gameplay goes crazy fast when you cut the turnaround times of asking for animations and stuff to go with your experiments out of the picture. Mess with some gameplay, design some levels, go all untextured and programmer art and recycled assets from previous games and you're golden, five guys who know what they're doing can make a whole huge game like that in a couple months.

Get your five guys to make the whole game start to finish like that. It'll look like crap but that's not important, it just has to play good. Then, when it's already fun, and the levels are basically designed, and the story is written, then you bring in the big team for the final stretch on the expensive bits. Replace your boxy CSG test levels with real art. Animate new models. Bring in the voice actors and get the sound guys doing their thing. Screw with the engine to push boundaries, like you do. But the key here is that the game part of the game is already made, there's a very clear picture of what work needs to be done.

Heck, you're making Portal 3, right? Portal is 90% puzzles. And Valve made that whole slick fancy level editor for fans to use, right? The one that's so ridiculously easy to use that a braindead monkey can make Portal test chambers in a few minutes a pop?

Build the first version of Portal 3 in the Portal 2 test chamber editor. Do you even need five guys? You could have a comprehensive prototype in a snap and bring in the big guns to go from there. Bro if you really wanted to make Portal 3 you absolutely *could* solo it, forget all the polish, make the scaffolding. Save the set dressing for later, that's where the time is spent.

Or say you don't solo it. Say that you get all 300 people at the company... for one, single day. Everyone, business people included. Sit everyone in front of the portal 2 test chamber editor, even the accountants, remember, brain dead monkeys can do it. Have everyone shoot for 5 levels, tell them to go wild, make anything they want. See what they come up with. Make it a party, get everyone in a room together bouncing ideas off each other with the level editor right there to realize them as fast as you can think it up. Then have everyone play each other's levels, try to sort out the best stuff. Boom. Just like that, you've got a huge amount of content to jump off with. 300 x 5, we're talking 1,500 levels here, no way you can't find two dozen or so ideas worth exploring further.

And if it's a party? A party with 300 of the most creative people on the planet hanging out together to just make something? No risk, no strings attached? You're gonna get a lot more than just levels. You're going to get jokes out the wazoo. Story ideas. New mechanics, people going "wouldn't it be cool if...?"

You don't have to commit to a 3 year development cycle with all hands on deck, you can start something good just having a little bit of fun.

I will simply say that if it were really that easy, then that's how everybody would do it.

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Quoting: kuhpunkt

Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: kuhpunkt

Quoting: sub

Quoting: BeamboomImagine sitting on a *guaranteed* multi million seller game franchise and choose NOT to release a sequel.
And they even have several of those. They're livin' the good life over there at Valve.

Well, I guess we're easy to overlook the numbers.
While it seems to be big money, it's actually significantly less compared to Steam sales
and putting all your resources in there.

The estimates for Valve's annual revenue is like 7-10 billion USD.
Compare that to the total of sold Half Life copies (~ 9 million) over many, many years -
even if you assume they were all sold at max price (they weren't).
In particular, if you consider how much pressure it must be for Valve always trying to keep
or surpass their standards for their games (I can only imagine). So there is a risk for reputation loss.

Don't get me wrong. I'd love to see Valve getting back to their franchises.
And there IS room for hope. And I'd also claim there is way more value for Valve having those franchises alive
with recent high-class releases than "just" what they directly earn from them.
I just hope they see this.

Yes - but if they weren't developing games anymore, why employ them? They earn good money at Valve and they aren't doing nothing.

Positions are not as clearly defined at Valve as you might expect, and employees can freely move from one project and position to another depending on their interests. So just because someone might have the job title "level designer" doesn't necessarily mean he spends 40 hours a week designing levels for games.

Point is, you can't look at job titles at Valve and get any idea of what is happening inside the company.

I know, but there are still like 300 people at Valve and you don't need that many to run Steam.

Valve is more than just Steam (which is a massive project in and of itself). There are also people working on hardware development and manufacturing, game maintenance which includes not just patches but multiplayer servers, PR and marketing, research and planning for future projects, not to mention basic staff for the internal bureaucracy to keep a company of that size running.

There's plenty going on at Valve to keep 300 full time employees busy.

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Quoting: TrainDoc

Quoting: Kristian

Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: EikeI can understand frustration there. Imagine you were a software developer working for a cool company with some of the coolest franchises out there - and you're not allowed to work on them, for years, for decades maybe...

As I understand Valve's corporate structure, it's the employees who more or less decide the direction of the company. So it's not like there are a bunch of people champing at the bit to make new games but the bosses won't let them. If enough people got together and decided they wanted to make Half-Life 3, or Portal 3, or whatever, Gabe wouldn't stop them. The real question is why there's no momentum internally to get those projects rolling.

There is the infamous Valve employee handbook [External Link].

Total PR stunt btw. No such document existed before or after and is just a recruiting tool. Valve's problems is it's rockstar developers lead the charge on everything and juniors who don't fall in line risk termination.

At least one former Valve employee has gone on record to say that the handbook is real. However, she does agree with you that there are people within the company who have managed to acquire quite a lot of internal influence which rather defeats the purpose of a flat management structure.

https://www.wired.com/2013/07/wireduk-valve-jeri-ellsworth/ [External Link]

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Quoting: kuhpunkt

Quoting: sub

Quoting: BeamboomImagine sitting on a *guaranteed* multi million seller game franchise and choose NOT to release a sequel.
And they even have several of those. They're livin' the good life over there at Valve.

Well, I guess we're easy to overlook the numbers.
While it seems to be big money, it's actually significantly less compared to Steam sales
and putting all your resources in there.

The estimates for Valve's annual revenue is like 7-10 billion USD.
Compare that to the total of sold Half Life copies (~ 9 million) over many, many years -
even if you assume they were all sold at max price (they weren't).
In particular, if you consider how much pressure it must be for Valve always trying to keep
or surpass their standards for their games (I can only imagine). So there is a risk for reputation loss.

Don't get me wrong. I'd love to see Valve getting back to their franchises.
And there IS room for hope. And I'd also claim there is way more value for Valve having those franchises alive
with recent high-class releases than "just" what they directly earn from them.
I just hope they see this.

Yes - but if they weren't developing games anymore, why employ them? They earn good money at Valve and they aren't doing nothing.

Positions are not as clearly defined at Valve as you might expect, and employees can freely move from one project and position to another depending on their interests. So just because someone might have the job title "level designer" doesn't necessarily mean he spends 40 hours a week designing levels for games.

Point is, you can't look at job titles at Valve and get any idea of what is happening inside the company.

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Quoting: EikeI can understand frustration there. Imagine you were a software developer working for a cool company with some of the coolest franchises out there - and you're not allowed to work on them, for years, for decades maybe...

As I understand Valve's corporate structure, it's the employees who more or less decide the direction of the company. So it's not like there are a bunch of people champing at the bit to make new games but the bosses won't let them. If enough people got together and decided they wanted to make Half-Life 3, or Portal 3, or whatever, Gabe wouldn't stop them. The real question is why there's no momentum internally to get those projects rolling.

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Hooray! It's the year of Linux! \o/

Again.

How many times have we heard this story? While Linux is never going away, I have given up all pretense that it will ever be a dominant operating system on the home computer. The Steam Deck is explicitly a Linux device, so of course people who try to put Windows on it are going to have a bad time, but I really don't see this leading developers to broadly embrace Linux. Most of them seem content to let Valve do the heavy lifting to get their games working in Linux via Proton.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Mountain ManIf only Razer hardware wasn't trash.

I've had my Razer mouse for over four years still going strong.

For whatever reason, their mice seem to be halfway decent. Just about everything else they make is garbage attached to a USB cable.

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Quoting: PinballWizardI made a similar transition from Gentoo; a hard drive died and I decided rather than the laborious install I would install Ubuntu and call it a day.

Curiously, I started using Kubuntu for a similar reason. I was actually in the middle of a college project when a Gentoo update decided to render my computer unbootable (yes, I know, I shouldn't have updated a mission critical computer that was working just fine), and since I didn't have a week to spend recompiling the whole thing from the ground up (this was about 15 years ago), I installed Kubuntu and was back in business in about 20 minutes.

I was very happy with Kubuntu for a very long time but recently switched to Manjora for reasons I don't entirely remember. I think I just wanted to get away from the lengthy upgrade process every six months, and I liked the idea of always having the most up to software available. Manjora has been rock solid, too (not that Kubuntu was ever unstable).

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If only Razer hardware wasn't trash.

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