What's It Really like Working at Valve? We Found Out.

Not the most important takeaway, but the graphic design of this video is sooooo lovely

The reason Valve's Lawyer is reading the emails, is cause they nearly lost their court case in Australia by default cause they didn't read their email saying they were being served... so a judge ordered a press announcement and gave permission to proceed with the trial with Valve being declared absent, Valve learnt of the case from a games media blog that said they were being sued :P Now a lawyer reads all their emails :P

Valve learned a long time ago that, when it came to game development "It's better to say nothing and be wrong then say something and still be wrong." and have gone on to apply that mentality to everything.

It kinda seems like the incentive structure for employees at Valve could explain why they’ve developed a reputation for not releasing sequels. Why work on those when short-term projects are so highly rewarded?

I like that you make the distinction that a Flat Style of management doesn't imply a worker cooperative or vice-versa. Ownership structure and management structure are separate things and can be mixed and matched to best fit the market and stakeholders.

Gabe`s biggest praise will always be keeping Valve a private company and being able of making his vision about a company a reality, for better or worse.

I love the idea that "We have no boss" and the boss show up in a meeting and lay that law and acts like it is a collective decision.

When it comes to game development studios valve feels like some ancient civilisation that’s managed to stay uncontacted for thousands of years. So interesting seeing what actually goes on in there!

Can't imagine how many people must've started working on Half Life 3 only to hear about the dozens of projects that came before and got rejected and ended up not even presenting it :D

Wait. What's Gabe's beef with Sopranos? I think that's the most mysterious thing here.

I like that you mentioned worker co-ops because it seems to me that Valve is trying to get the benefits of a co-op without giving the workers the benefits of a co-op. If your mission statement is about letting people do what they think is best for the company, but then your incentive scheme rates people individually then they're going to look at it individually and not as the company. They will do the things that lead to them personally getting the best outcome, and will burn out and leave if they aren't the type of person to do that. If you had a true structureless worker co-op where profits are disseminated throughout the work-force, then people would be more willing to do the things that benefit the company as that directly comes back to them. However currently it seems like the things that benefit the company and the things that benefit the individual are opposites.

That Valve's supposedly flat hierarchy leads to a dysfunctional, insular work environment should be no surprise to anyone who's worked at small, family-owned companies with no formal structure. What that actually means in practice is that the hierarchies are hidden and less accountable.

IMO giving employees $10k to donate to whatever they want is better than any statement they can make "words are cheap" and all that. Sure someone can keep the cash for themselves but that isn't a reflection on Valve, that's on the employee.

Great video, but the bit about 3% of respondents thinking a 30% cut is justified is a bit duplicitous. The source reveals that 72% of respondents thought a lower cut was justified, not the implied 97%.

I've recently been picturing Valve as the Oldest House from Control. They've always been so mysterious.

I find it funny that they allow anything that they decide isn't "illegal or straight up trolling" on steam, meanwhile as a developer I know that they've got a complete list of things that they "won't publish" that they've just completely ignored I guess. It's publicly available in the steamworks documentation, and I guess it's worded as "What you shouldn’t publish on Steam", but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be self enforced if that's what they mean by that. Anyway's here's the list copy and pasted in case anyone's curious: Hate speech, i.e. speech that promotes hatred, violence or discrimination against groups of people based on ethnicity, religion, gender, age, disability or sexual orientation Nude or sexually explicit images of real people Adult content that isn’t appropriately labeled and age-gated Libelous or defamatory statements Content you don’t own or have adequate rights to Content that violates the laws of any jurisdiction in which it will be available Content that is patently offensive or intended to shock or disgust viewers Content that exploits children in any way Applications that modify customer’s computers in unexpected or harmful ways, such as malware or viruses Applications that fraudulently attempts to gather sensitive information, such as Steam credentials or financial data (e.g. credit card information) Video content not directly related to a product that has shipped on Steam. Non-interactive 360 VR Videos Applications built on blockchain technology that issue or allow exchange of cryptocurrencies or NFTs.

The most damning thing about this video is that Gabe Newell seems to not like The Sopranos.

I think the central issue here is that valve is structurally averse to taking action in any direction. This is partially because any employee who tries to get the ball rolling will be held responsible for how it goes, regardless of whether its their fault or not.

The reason why Valve is considered so separate from EA, Epic games, Ubisoft, etc is simply because they don't make themselves stand out when it isn't needed. They don't make stances on controversial topics if they don't need to, they don't get in controversy publicly when they can help it, and they definitely don't make their internal problems public unless rogue employees try to. Valve sits there in the back doing its own thing privately and quietly which is how they rarely gets the ire of their users but obviously that doesn't make them immune to any criticism / problems as some of the more egregious things in this documentary has shown.

Now I'm really waiting for a Riot Games video.