This. It’s not a meme that Valve prints money instead of developing games, their resources are spent towards Dota and CSGO to further monetize their esports scene. Day of Defeat, Left 4 Dead, Portal et. al are seemingly dead in the water because they can’t be monetized similarly.
Valve is very interesting to read about because they're nominally a flat hierarchy despite being a capitalist corporation with private owners and no workplace democracy, and the result is basically that they've turned into a bunch of toxic cliques that anyone going to work for them need to carefully navigate and join on their own initiative in order to actually end up working on anything and so avoid being fired for not working. This is also why they've basically stopped making new large scale projects (with only a very few exceptions): those require clear organization and vision and while as I understand it people at Valve could technically just start doing one of their own accord, if they didn't get enough other people on board to make it viable they'd end up getting ousted for not being productive, meaning no one wanted to take the risk or be left holding the bag for it so they instead just try to attach themselves to the popular and "prestigious" cliques, which are obviously the ones making Valve's owners money hand over fist for minimal investment.
It's like a case study in exactly how not to minimize hierarchy and leadership, resulting in everything toxic about both corporate work environments and leaderless organizing being rolled into one dysfunctional package.
This. It’s not a meme that Valve prints money instead of developing games, their resources are spent towards Dota and CSGO to further monetize their esports scene. Day of Defeat, Left 4 Dead, Portal et. al are seemingly dead in the water because they can’t be monetized similarly.
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Valve is very interesting to read about because they're nominally a flat hierarchy despite being a capitalist corporation with private owners and no workplace democracy, and the result is basically that they've turned into a bunch of toxic cliques that anyone going to work for them need to carefully navigate and join on their own initiative in order to actually end up working on anything and so avoid being fired for not working. This is also why they've basically stopped making new large scale projects (with only a very few exceptions): those require clear organization and vision and while as I understand it people at Valve could technically just start doing one of their own accord, if they didn't get enough other people on board to make it viable they'd end up getting ousted for not being productive, meaning no one wanted to take the risk or be left holding the bag for it so they instead just try to attach themselves to the popular and "prestigious" cliques, which are obviously the ones making Valve's owners money hand over fist for minimal investment.
It's like a case study in exactly how not to minimize hierarchy and leadership, resulting in everything toxic about both corporate work environments and leaderless organizing being rolled into one dysfunctional package.