Newell: Specialization in Gaming is "The Enemy of the Future"

BlameTheWizards

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Newell: Specialization in Gaming is "The Enemy of the Future"



Valve's co-founder credits the company's flexible corporate structure and level of employee trust with the success of Steam and other products.


Valve is one of the biggest names in gaming today, and co-founder and CEO Gabe Newell credits a lot of that success with the company's unconventional corporate structure. In a lengthy interview with The Washington Post, Newell called flexibility one of the greatest strengths of Valve. "You need people who are adaptable because the thing that makes you the best in the world in one generation of games is going to be totally useless in the next," he said. "So specialization in gaming is sort of the enemy of the future. We had to think about if we're going to be in a business that's changing that quickly, how do we avoid institutionalizing one set of production methods in such a way that we can't adapt to what's going to be coming next."

What it comes down to for Newell and Valve is hiring hard workers and then trusting them to do their jobs. Valve avoids giving employees titles so their staff does not associate themselves too strongly with one task. "If somebody becomes the group manager of X, they're going to really resist it when X is not what you want to do in the next round of games," Newell said. "You don't want them to sort of burrow into that - you want them to recognize that being really good at Half-Life level design is not as nearly as valued as thinking of how to design social multiplayer experiences. You've had them feel like they have an organization and title tied up to something when the key is to just continue to follow where the customers are leading."

While it's certainly an unorthodox approach in the business world, its hard to argue with the results. The level of trust the employees had in each other is what ultimately led to the successful launch of Steam, which was seen as a big gamble at the time even by those within the company. "There were a bunch of people internally who thought Steam was a really bad idea, but what they didn't think was that they would tell the people who were working on Steam what to do with their time," Newell said. "They were like 'that's what you want to do wit your time, that's fine, but we're going to spend our time working on Half-Life 2. We think you're kind of wasting your time, but it's your time to waste.'"


Source: The Washington Post

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ohnoitsabear

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It sounds all nice when Gabe puts it like that, and Valve's corporate structure definitely has led to some good things happening, but I think it deserves mention that a lot of Valve's biggest problems come from not wanting to have people in dedicated positions.

For example, I would argue that one of Valve's biggest problems is communication with their fans, or lack thereof. The whole Diretide fiasco could have been easily avoided if they just had a couple of dedicated PR people that could give the community some idea of what Valve's plans were, and gauge interest in the event. And don't even get me started on all of the communication issues regarding Half-Life 3.

This corporate structure also seems to be the reason why there isn't better customer support for Steam, which is something they need to fix if they intend on selling hardware. Of course, Valve's corporate structure could have nothing to do with their customer support, but in either case it's something that clearly doesn't have a high priority within the company.

Also:

you want them to recognize that being really good at Half-Life level design is not as nearly as valued as thinking of how to design social multiplayer experiences.
Maybe if they valued Half-Life level design more, they would have actually released a sequel by now.
 

FalloutJack

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Actually, I would think that specializing in being a game publisher with no clue as to how the business should be run and no respect for the developers or the customers is the enemy of the future.

Wait, no. That's an enemy of the NOW. The enemy of the future is anyone who thinks progress is control.
 

VinLAURiA

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Gabe said:
You don't want them to sort of burrow into that - you want them to recognize that being really good at Half-Life level design is not as nearly as valued as thinking of how to design social multiplayer experiences.
How depressingly telling.
 

Neurotic Void Melody

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"You want them to recognise that being really good at half-life level design is not as nearly valued as thinking of how to design social multiplayer experiences"

AhHAH!! The truth revealed!
Am i the only one who took only this information from this report, to the heart?
 

Agayek

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A lot of what he says here is good, but it seems directly contradicted by what Valve does in practice. Yeah, they're an industry juggernaut, but that's not because of their games. They barely release any games at all. Valve's less of a game developer and more of a publisher these days, and the bulk of their influence throughout the industry comes from controlling Steam.

Don't get me wrong, I really like Valve as a company, but they are not a golden standard to hold up for game developers. If every studio was set up like Valve, we'd have all of a dozen games to play. Their corporate structure seems to work decently well overall, but it's godawful for adhering to a schedule and getting things done in a timely fashion. That's why structures were invented in the first place, so that everyone knows what they're doing, there's minimal overlap, and people don't have to stress about the surrounding portions of their jobs to reach the end product. Valve's setup is great for prototyping and expanding, as that kind of amorphous structure is perfect for rapid adaptation and shifting goals, but not for a sustained, regular business venture. The only reason they've managed to keep it going as long/well as they have is because they're fucking brilliant.
 

Rednog

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Like 'ohnoitsabear' said, Valve's attitude to how they go about their business is really a double edged sword.
On the one hand they manage to strike gold in various places, on the other hand they take that pick ax and ram it into the forehead of the customer. They really need to take a step back in a lot of situations and ask themselves whether or not their plan is actually going to pan out. Just throwing shit out there and seeing if it sticks and then refusing to actually change it until the thing is dead on the floor really isn't helpful.

Don't get me wrong Valve is going to be Valve and people are going to pretty much love them regardless as long as they get sales...just don't make it hard to love you Valve.
 

Vivi22

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ohnoitsabear said:
It sounds all nice when Gabe puts it like that, and Valve's corporate structure definitely has led to some good things happening, but I think it deserves mention that a lot of Valve's biggest problems come from not wanting to have people in dedicated positions.

For example, I would argue that one of Valve's biggest problems is communication with their fans, or lack thereof. The whole Diretide fiasco could have been easily avoided if they just had a couple of dedicated PR people that could give the community some idea of what Valve's plans were, and gauge interest in the event. And don't even get me started on all of the communication issues regarding Half-Life 3.
If those are the biggest problems they have then I'd say they're doing pretty good. People expecting a free holiday event which was never announced or information on a sequel that they may or may not have even been working on this whole time, and have never even come close to officially announcing are pretty mild.

Hell, you could even argue that the problem are Valve's fans, not Valve's communication. Certainly with regard to HL3. Valve provide news on new games when there's actually something worth sharing like a release date, a working Alpha that'll be finished within a year, etc. Too many people seem to forget that they used to announce everything right away which just lead to people getting annoyed when TF2 as it was originally conceived stopped being a priority because it wasn't working, and when HL2 had to be delayed for a year. Now they just don't talk about what they're working on until it's a sure thing that'll be released on time and you get people whining about them not making promises they can't keep anymore.

People can't have it both ways and, frankly, I prefer the latter if I've got to choose between the two. But I guess some people still have it in their heads that the only games they've ever made were Half-Life and Portal.

Maybe if they valued Half-Life level design more, they would have actually released a sequel by now.
This comment doesn't even really make sense.
 

Vivi22

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Rednog said:
Like 'ohnoitsabear' said, Valve's attitude to how they go about their business is really a double edged sword.
On the one hand they manage to strike gold in various places, on the other hand they take that pick ax and ram it into the forehead of the customer. They really need to take a step back in a lot of situations and ask themselves whether or not their plan is actually going to pan out. Just throwing shit out there and seeing if it sticks and then refusing to actually change it until the thing is dead on the floor really isn't helpful.
I use Steam extensively and have played every Valve game and I honestly can't pinpoint how your comments relate to anything they've done.
 

Vivi22

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Agayek said:
A lot of what he says here is good, but it seems directly contradicted by what Valve does in practice. Yeah, they're an industry juggernaut, but that's not because of their games. They barely release any games at all. Valve's less of a game developer and more of a publisher these days, and the bulk of their influence throughout the industry comes from controlling Steam.
Valve has developed and released a minimum of one game a year since 2004. I'm not sure where people get this idea that they barely release games. They're more prolific than pretty much any developer out there right now. Name one other company that can release that many games in the same time frame and have pretty much all of them actually be very good. I can't think of any.

Regardless of what some people seem to try and claim (either as a result of being ignorant to the extent of Valve's releases, or out of malice), they're doing more as a developer than pretty much anyone. And they're willing to take some fairly big risks for a company that's privately held and a relative newcomer compared to the likes of EA, Activision, Nintendo, Sony, etc. And they're doing it all without actually being a game publisher in the traditional sense of the term.

Whatever they're doing, they're getting an awful lot of things right.
 

Frezzato

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I suppose this is as good a place as any to put this, but there's this great extended interview with Gabe from a year ago, which can be found by searching for The Nerdist Podcast. It's two interviews, for a total of over two hours of just casual conversation with Gabe, another Valve employee, the podcast host (Chris Hardwick), I think Chris' girlfriend, and Wil Wheaton.

It's interesting as you get tidbits of what exactly Valve was working on back then, which is keeping with what he was quoted as saying regarding gaming specialization.

*EDIT* Jesus, they were talking about Valve's controller in a podcast from January 2013.
 

Albino Boo

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Valve's primary source of income comes from being the dominant retailer in the PC market. If valve never published another game they would still be a multi billion dollar company. You have much larger workforces to develop a greater number of games if you are going to make you income from being a publisher and so called flat management structures don't scale well. For all Gabes flat structure, I bet it doesn't apply the the people who clean the offices but those and such as those who are deemed of high enough skill to be full valve employees.
 

Rednog

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Vivi22 said:
Rednog said:
Like 'ohnoitsabear' said, Valve's attitude to how they go about their business is really a double edged sword.
On the one hand they manage to strike gold in various places, on the other hand they take that pick ax and ram it into the forehead of the customer. They really need to take a step back in a lot of situations and ask themselves whether or not their plan is actually going to pan out. Just throwing shit out there and seeing if it sticks and then refusing to actually change it until the thing is dead on the floor really isn't helpful.
I use Steam extensively and have played every Valve game and I honestly can't pinpoint how your comments relate to anything they've done.
Greenlight is/was a massive failure.

They are one of the major digital distributors yet they are still pretty much the only one with a one refund for life policy and even then it's like pulling teeth to actually get it done. And their still on an email customer service method of dealing with problems. For a company that rakes in that much cash from their service their methods of dealing with customers problems are pretty bad. See how much outrage and bad publicity it took with the WarZ incident.

You've played all their stuff and haven't seen any problems. What about Man Vs Machine being an absolute nightmare on launch, eating people's tickets with no item payouts. Maps being completed with no rewards, people having to submit tickets to get a refund.
Or how about how Left 4 Dead 1 was basically crippled for 1-2 weeks when steam cloud launched and if you could sync to the cloud the game lost it's shit.

Then there's nonsense like them slapping down Paranautical Activity for jumping the greenlight line yet they front page promote nonsense like Revelations 2012 and Garry's Incident and let those skip the greenlight.

Or how about how Steam sold games that basically didn't work. There's were numerous occasions prior to this before Valve just started adding the disclaimer of "This game may not work on X and Y OS". Heck I still remember being peeved when I bought the Tom Clancy Bundle from steam and damn near every other game had to be fixed from community solutions.

I'm sure there's lots of things that I've forgotten over time that Valve has handled poorly, but those above should suffice.
Don't get me wrong Valve's doing something right, otherwise I wouldn't have stuck with them for 10+ years and have 776 games on steam. But they really do some boneheaded shit sometimes, and it's pretty embarrassing when they're pretty much waving the flag of the PC industry's leader.
 

Agayek

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Vivi22 said:
Valve has developed and released a minimum of one game a year since 2004. I'm not sure where people get this idea that they barely release games. They're more prolific than pretty much any developer out there right now. Name one other company that can release that many games in the same time frame and have pretty much all of them actually be very good. I can't think of any.
That's... kinda irrelevant to my point. The number of games they've put out is meaningless (though as far as I can remember, they've only put out Left 4 Dead (and the level pack sequel), Portal 2, and DotA 2 since the Orange Box came out in 2007).

My point was that the vast majority of Valve's recent efforts (or at least, public-facing efforts) are outside the realm of games. As a company, they're now quite focused on Steam, the SteamOS/Steam Box, AR/VR type stuff, and all the other periphery stuff that surrounds games. They haven't been (publicly) truly focused on game creation since Portal 2. That doesn't decrease the quality of the things they produce, but it does make them less of a developer and more of a publisher, because that's what they're focusing on.

They've made their corporate structure work for them, and it works quite well, but the only reason it does work is because they're goddamn geniuses at what they do, and they have a decent helping of luck backing them up. Most companies using a similar structure would collapse under their own inability to get anything done.
 

Tiamat666

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Not sure I agree. Quite a few game makers specialize and excel at their type of game, and are doing very well for it. Bethesda, BioWare, Spiderweb Software, formerly, Id Software...

The real enemy of the future that is killing games is the trend of developing games for the lowest common denominator. Which seems to be a 14 year old with a game pad.
 

Li Mu

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Gabe! I don't want to hear another word from your mouth unless it refers to Half Life 3 and when it's coming out.
 

Vigormortis

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Agayek said:
"Valve don't make games anymore." - paraphrased
Agayek said:
Vivi22 said:
Valve has developed and released a minimum of one game a year since 2004.
That's... kinda irrelevant to my point. The number of games they've put out is meaningless
I'm sorry, but....what?

I'm mean, seriously. What?

Your comments are so contradictory it's a wonder you've a leg to stand on.
 

josemlopes

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Rednog said:
Heck I still remember being peeved when I bought the Tom Clancy Bundle from steam and damn near every other game had to be fixed from community solutions.
With the exception of GOG that tries to make the old games work properly out of the box even the games that you buy in stores usually need community solutions for multiple things (especially somewhat older games), its part of PC gaming where nothing is exactly tailored to anything and you end up having to tweak the shit out of everything yourself