I am a gamer with probably like 7k hours in DOTA and I've following Valve for quite a long time. Their secret sauce is that they aren't a corporate that is run by guys who's only videogame in their life was Excel Spreadsheet and efficient management. They are a company that is built by gamers and for gamers and thus they have a VERY deep understanding of gamers psychology.
Another thing that their doing is they aren't generating their own ideas for projects. Instead they are hiring community members that were basically doing cool stuff for the sake of cool stuff for free and they are giving them resources to do it even better. Best example is DOTA, which was a custom map for Wacraft3.
Gaben learned a lot from Blizzard who were the same and made legendary games like Warcraft, Starcraft, WoW, etc. I remember being a child and waiting for those games being in development for 5-6 years. And they never had any dealines, the mode of operations was "when it's done". Imagine something like this in a corporate! Everything changed when they went public and were slowly overtaken by efficient management. Never made a single good game since, everything is just absolute crap (Diablo 4 included). And in 2020 Mike Morhaime left Blizzard to found his own studio that is developing their first game since then.
That being said people say Valve is in deep stagnation right now because of Steam. Steam ended up being SO GOOD that it effectively monopolized online game sales and is generating a lion share of Valve's revenue eith very little effort. So essentially Valve is in a resource curse state right now and that's why they basically had zero successful projects over the past many many years. The new game, Deadlock, looks interesting, but its essentially first-person view DOTA and for some reason I have a feeling that it won't be even close to DOTA-level success.
So essentially they are more about doing really cool stuff instead of generating YoY % growth for shareholders.
Kinda similar to Wine industry, which I'm also a big fan of.
U.S. has incredible wine potential, but "efficient business" approach is completely killing the industry, wine quality (and diversity!) in the U.S. has dropped dramatically over the past 10 years, while prices have gone up like crazy. Mostly because lots of wineries have been bought by PE funds that don't give a shit about wine itself.
Compare that to EU where people are much more trying to do Art, not business. Are they less profitable? On the 5-year horizon - for sure. But that's how they become immortal!
I am a gamer with probably like 7k hours in DOTA and I've following Valve for quite a long time. Their secret sauce is that they aren't a corporate that is run by guys who's only videogame in their life was Excel Spreadsheet and efficient management. They are a company that is built by gamers and for gamers and thus they have a VERY deep understanding of gamers psychology.
Another thing that their doing is they aren't generating their own ideas for projects. Instead they are hiring community members that were basically doing cool stuff for the sake of cool stuff for free and they are giving them resources to do it even better. Best example is DOTA, which was a custom map for Wacraft3.
Gaben learned a lot from Blizzard who were the same and made legendary games like Warcraft, Starcraft, WoW, etc. I remember being a child and waiting for those games being in development for 5-6 years. And they never had any dealines, the mode of operations was "when it's done". Imagine something like this in a corporate! Everything changed when they went public and were slowly overtaken by efficient management. Never made a single good game since, everything is just absolute crap (Diablo 4 included). And in 2020 Mike Morhaime left Blizzard to found his own studio that is developing their first game since then.
That being said people say Valve is in deep stagnation right now because of Steam. Steam ended up being SO GOOD that it effectively monopolized online game sales and is generating a lion share of Valve's revenue eith very little effort. So essentially Valve is in a resource curse state right now and that's why they basically had zero successful projects over the past many many years. The new game, Deadlock, looks interesting, but its essentially first-person view DOTA and for some reason I have a feeling that it won't be even close to DOTA-level success.
So essentially they are more about doing really cool stuff instead of generating YoY % growth for shareholders.
Kinda similar to Wine industry, which I'm also a big fan of.
U.S. has incredible wine potential, but "efficient business" approach is completely killing the industry, wine quality (and diversity!) in the U.S. has dropped dramatically over the past 10 years, while prices have gone up like crazy. Mostly because lots of wineries have been bought by PE funds that don't give a shit about wine itself.
Compare that to EU where people are much more trying to do Art, not business. Are they less profitable? On the 5-year horizon - for sure. But that's how they become immortal!
Thanks for all the context!
I can't believe you didn't mention that 'killing people' is among the generalist skills the ideal T-shaped employee has.
thought it was a given
ok, TIL on valve's performance as a company. Now with that context, all the Lord Gaben memes make so much more sense
had not heard of valve! I love that desk-moving diagram; that is a helpful mindset to instill