Valve Software handbook for new employees [pdf] (2012)
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thoughtful
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company culture
management
gaming industry
The 2012 Valve Software handbook for new employees has been shared, sparking discussion on its relevance, company culture, and management practices.
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EDIT: Another comment mentioned Chet Faliszek, he was probably the source.
People keep forgetting our time is limited and nothing lasts forever.
It's true that entropy will be the end of us all but while there are definitely things that may end Valve, "management" leaving isn't going to the thing that does it. It might be wise to learn about the company you speak so definitively about, I suggest reading the pamplet.
Nothing lasts forever.
CS:GO (remake of a remake)
Dota 2 (remake)
Artifact (flopped)
Underlords (flopped)
Alyx (good)
Counter-Strike 2 (remake of a remake of a remake)
Deadlock (early beta, but promising)
Now, the game isn't exactly out yet, but it is pretty widely accessible, and the core of the game is just fantastic. They really cooked with this one, especially the movement system.
There was a recent streamer that said it best: the game design fundamentally punishes you for engaging with other players. Instead, it rewards you for running around the map breaking static entities (boxes, statues, static creeps, etc.). Which is, frankly, boring.
There's just no way imo that will ever be successful in an FPS/shooter. It might work for MOBAs, but I think the idea of a MOBA-first shooter is just never going to get much traction beyond a niche.
Maybe Valve will see the light and significantly change things. I'm not sure. The "open alpha" was also kind of a disaster in killing off the first wave of the player base.
Also, I am no longer a 20 year old with no responsibilities and sometimes things come up where I would need to leave the game. I guess I am just getting older now and no longer play 20 hours a weeks of video games, but things like Deadlock don’t have appeal.
> Nothing is worse being stuck in a game where you are not having fun and you are forced to keep playing or be punished otherwise.
It works approximately the same irl for board games or sports. If you just walk off the court in a basketball game because you're not having fun, everyone else will be pissed. Ditto if you just ditch a board game session midway through.
It's funny you mention age, because I have essentially the opposite take. Ditching a match for a game you like because that particular match isn't going well is immature; I'd expect someone older to handle themselves better than someone younger, not throw a fit.
Now of course there are some games where it's fine for people to jump in and out, they're designed around that, but just like with other sorts of games, it's hard to get competitive matches that way.
There are two things. First, it is not about maturity it is about having other responsibilities in life. If my kid needs something from me I am going to drop the video game and help my kid — it’s called having a dependent for a reason. Second, I have less free time as I get older so why would I spend precious little time I have being socially locked into a situation I am not enjoying?
You seem to be projecting that if someone cannot commit to a competitive activity/sport they are somehow immature, but in reality lots of people cannot or do not want that in their life.
My comment was not saying that Deadlock is a bad game or somehow invalid, my comment is that the type of game Deadlock is does not mesh with my tastes/life.
> Nothing is worse being stuck in a game where you are not having fun and you are forced to keep playing or be punished otherwise.
Sure, needing to take care of certain responsibilities is fine, but ditching everyone else in a game because you're temporarily "not having fun"? Yes, that is immature.
That is purely a subjective moral judgement. I can also make a judgment that you projecting moral judgments onto strangers is also immature.
There I did it too, fun…
Personally, I love that kind of depth and complexity, and I would hate for Icefrog to listen to the people pushing for the game to become more simplified and Overwatch-like. We already have Overwatch and Rivals for people who just want to fight all the time, but there's nothing really like Deadlock that combines MOBAs and hero shooters with the mechanical depth that Deadlock has -- especially when you factor in the movement tech.
> There's just no way imo that will ever be successful in an FPS/shooter. It might work for MOBAs, but I think the idea of a MOBA-first shooter is just never going to get much traction beyond a niche.
It's definitely a risky play in some sense, but arguably less risky than engaging a pure MOBA or pure hero shooter directly, since those have already well established, polished entries. That there's nothing really like Deadlock out there is one of its big advantages, if you like Deadlock's gameplay, there's really no alternative.
It's been on my list of "eventual todos" to make a trivial update to help reinforce that it's still relevant.
Previous discussion:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3871463 (21 April 2012 | 16 comments)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8818893 (31 December 2014 | 17 comments)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9250527 (23 March 2015 | 14 comments)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12157993 (25 July 2016 | 197 comments)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17935030 (7 September 2018 | 31 comments)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33170988 (12 October 2022 | 165 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41329274 (23 August 2024 | 112 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26960473 (27 April 2021 | 7 comments)
They're the idealized version of what a small company making a shitton of cash would be. They can afford plenty in terms of work-life balance.
Gamedev is also very stressful industy because both constant crunches and job instability. So you not only paid worse, but you'll work 2-3 times more that average SWE. And often fired when project is complete regardless of success.
So working at Valve is somewhat like a pipe dream for many people in the game industry. Especially because whole Valve is under 500 people which is like 10-20 times less people than work for Epic, Ubisoft or EA.
Source: I work in indie game company.
However, non-hierarchical structures are often open to manipulation and land-grabbing (see Tyranny of Structurelessness, etc.) so I am also skeptical that a company may have continued with this practice.
But how many billion-dollar companies would do that? Just give the rights to the ex-employees? I think most other companies would have not. So, in that sense, Valve is unusual, even if it's not the oranizational utopia that was promised.
After she left Valve, she and partners did get at least $15 million funding from outside investors to develop the AR technology, but after several years of trying, it didn't work out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CastAR
I don't really understand why VR helmets they aren't more successful. My first guess is that any console needs exclusive high-profile games to be successful, and producing many exclusive high-profile Meta Quest games is probably too expensive for current market adoption. A chicken-egg problem.
Or maybe the hardware price isn't low enough currently. The original Game Boy was successful with its low price despite its terrible screen. The Game Boy Color chipset was very underpowered compared to the competition but again more affordable.
I think the more relevant difference is that there are vastly more (and therefore: better) PC games than VR games.
Most people psychologically don’t like wearing or carrying technology unless there’s a really good reason. Most people also don’t like psychologically feeling isolated.
VR doesn’t have a good reason, and makes you feel isolated. No further rationale is necessary.
I personally believe that VR of the arm swinging/interactive variety will never be widely adopted due to the cost of real estate in the tech savvy, trend-setting consumer population centers.
Compare with setting up a home theater and having people over to watch a movie, or split screen gaming.
After all that you run into the limited content availability and, as you noted, the high price.
I do wonder why Meta hasn’t done something like license Skyrim or GTA for the quest. It shouldn’t be too expensive compared with the other investments, and would bring over some solidly popular (and big!) content.
The mouse, keyboard, and monitor is pretty much just right. Highly productive, you can go super fast, with extreme information density.
VR and AR are obviously much slower to navigate because physical worlds are slow to navigate and that's what they're mimicing. We might assume a 3D world has more information density than a 2D screen... But 90% of the time it doesn't. I don't have eyes on the back of my head. And, usually, I'm going to be staring at a 2D thing.
VR has basically been for niche high-end gamers. I can imagine a jet flighter simulation might be good for VR but I'm not even sure that's such a thing these days. One can imagine other uses like virtual exploration but it hasn't been that interesting and a big monitor works pretty well as an alternative.
Oh people absolutely use it for this and it is an excellent use case - mainly because you stay seated.
But yeah. Pretty niche.
I wear glasses so I have to use special lenses to enable me to see in-game. These costed an addition 150 euros.
The XREAL Air 2 look appealing but I am unable to buy inserts for. This make's them useless to me.
> "While we plan to offer lenses for the Air 2, its updated frame design makes self-assembly of the lenses too difficult"
If where we lived in a fantasy world where everyone had a 10Gbit connections, perfect eyeballs. Yeah, it'd be great tech, practical too. But those without are left out like left-handed folk.
My Valve Index is sitting untouched behind me. I bought this in 2021, Why can't companies offer a version for those with a prescription? One size fit's all doesn't work here.
Do you think Valve was operating this way when they were trying to make their first money on half-life?
I have always been disappointed with people making claims that explicitly imposed bad hierarchy is inevitable, because of a vague complaint about implicit hierarchy.
It feels like they are using this to justify imposing a bad hierarchy from the top down, for the benefit of the people at the top of said imposed hierarchy. Like when you have a well-functioning team with a very weak explicit hierarchy, and the people at the top introduce a bunch of bad managers. They will tell you it was inevitable. There's no way the thing you saw working well could continue to work well. Because that lack of bad managers was actually working just as poorly, you see. In fact it was much worse.
At least I read it more as that you can't just declare 'there be no hierarchy here' and be done. Unless you carefully engineer the system, the implicit hierarchy will reclaim the void and, all else equal, an implicit hierarchy is harder to undo because it isn't supposed to exist.
In political terms: if all you do is kick the ruler out, you may get a corrupt patronage network instead of democracy. Actual equality doesn't come from just the absence of strong explicit hierarchy; it requires proper institutional design.
As a society, we have codified "business douche" structures as inevitable. It is fair to ask who benefits from this. Usually it's about people installing themselves as the top of the hierarchy, hoarding money, power, and status.
Was Pivotal Labs built with this in mind? A lot of their core principals seem to overlap with with seven principals prposed at the end (https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm for the curious)
I'd agree it's a meaningful distinction if the company wasn't actually as written... but it sounds like everything in there is accurate?
When smart people say ads don’t work on them - this is a counterexample. It’s just that different groups respond to different branding. And this was highly tuned to Reddit interests.
This comment is literally the first search result of "Chet Faliszek Valve employee handbook" for me. I've waded through several pages and haven't found a credible source of him saying that.
That being said, I don't want to say it is a bad thing or entirely wrong. It is of course a brushed up glorified version that certainly took a thing or two from their real experience working at Valve, but it was not used as an onboarding tool until it was published (and to my knowledge, isn't used nowadays as they have since changed their internal team composition since Half-Life Alyx was released).
Steam is still like what Netflix used to be. You have pretty much everything you care about in one place. Even big monster AAA developers like EA have given up and put their content on the platform. If I had to pick between having HL3 and a coherent gaming ecosystem, I'd pick the latter.
A HL3 team could essentially function as an independent studio using the Steam platform, with some funding thrown from Valve. Assuming the ROI is positive what exactly is holding them back?
The Google problem where every project that is not Search has a much worse ROI.
Absurd expectations.
Despite that gamers think it's worth the convenience and utilities steam provides to keep shopping there.
Steam isn't dominant because it's strangling competition like the app store and similar. People can trivially download alternatives, but they choose steam anyway.
According to the developer:
> [Valve] would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere, even from my own website without Steam keys and without Steam’s DRM.
> I believe that other developers who charged lower prices on other stores have been contacted by Valve, telling them that their games will be removed from Steam if they did not raise their prices on competing stores.
https://www.wolfire.com/blog/2021/05/Regarding-the-Valve-cla...
"This includes communications from Valve that “‘the price on Steam [must be] competitive with where it’s being sold elsewhere’” and that Valve “‘wouldn’t be OK with selling games on Steam if they are available at better prices on other stores, even if they didn’t use Steam keys.’” Dkt. No. 343 ¶ 158, 160 (quoting emails produced at VALVE_ANT_0598921, 0605087). "
(This is a new case, not the 2021 suit, which was rejected by the court, then amended and refiled, later with an additional plaintiff added)
[0]https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.29...
But as you’ve hinted at, Steam is very different from the iOS App Store because it is competing organically with other app stores on Windows. Steam does not control Windows or the hardware, so it cannot “force” itself to be the only option to download games on Windows.
And even when it does have full control over the platform and HW (Steam Deck), it’s just a light wrapper around a standard Linux distro (Arch).
I'm not sure why Steam always seems to be exempt from the "perils of digital ownership" arguments
Because they have been consistently good citizens for more than 2 decades. They built a reputation. Something other companies are eager to piss away at the first opportunity to sell out or squeeze their customers.
It’s not surprising that Valve is successful and trusted with this approach. What is surprising is that it is apparently so incredibly hard for other companies to understand this very simple fact.
1. Build a good product.
2. Consistently act in good faith.
3. Profit.
But as a consumer you have to think about what happens when leadership changes—PE buys them and starts reputation mining.
It takes a while to burn through the good will and for a few years you can make a lot more money off of that than you can continuing thing as usual.
I’m betting that won’t happen, and that the next BDFL is not going to run the thing into the ground fast enough for it to matter to me.
Valve is also facing a class action lawsuit for anticompetitive practices. If they lose, even though they will almost certainly survive, watch the tables flip upside down fast.
I am genuinely asking, as I am curious.
Products like the Steam Deck or Steam Controller don't need any Valve software to play games. Valve knows a post-Steam world will exist one day, and they're fine with that. From a consumer standpoint, I respect that.
#1 on its own isn't so bad, you should indeed treat reputation as a valuable asset, but the way their style of logic invariably jumps to "and therefore you should sell, sell, sell it!" is the source of the problems we see. Especially because they're likely to jump jobs before the consequences occur. We really ought to have a culture of looking askance at executives and decision makers who never spend more than 2 years at a job, rather than celebrating them. If they've never had to live with the effects of their decisions they're really just a fresh-out-of-college person with 10 instances of the same two years of experience.
They're not, really, but they've given us little reason to distrust them.
I'm also fairly confident there would be some fun legal stuff going on if Steam tried that. People have thousands - tens of thousands - of dollars worth of stuff on Steam. That isn't really the same as, say, having to watch ads even after paying for a subscription.
Most folks aren't keeping tabs on how many studios Microsoft nowadays owns as publisher, even moreso after the ABK deal.
Exactly as that famous quote says, currently Steam is the better product, but if Valve would go rogue, that could change easily.
> If Steam decided to charge $10/mo
If you think about games already purchased I suspect that would be illegal in many parts of the world.
Worst case, if I lose access to all of them, whether by choice or by force (they go under), there are other options of obtaining (most of) the same games, and that’s even if I’m interested in playing them again.
Most of the games I really care about, I probably already have on other platforms anyway, in addition to or instead of Steam.
Gabe says that the platform will fail-open if ever necessary, that it would revert to offline DRMless functionality. I believe that he has that intention, but the realities of operating from receivership or assimilation by Microsoft would likely be very different.
1 - Let's say you invested $100,000 of your own money for vertical slice and managed to find a publisher to give you $200,000 to complete the game.
2 - Ignore that you had some failed games before, but this time you let's say sold 100,000 copies for $10 each average. 100k sold is a big success really.
1 - Valve got $1,000,000 as gross revenue for 100,000 sales.
2 - Usually 16% is VAT and immenient refunds. So now $840,000 left.
3 - Now Valve took their 30% cut. $588,000 left.
4 - Now your publisher took $200,000 to recoup invested money. $388,000 left.
5 - Now publisher split remaining $388,000 by honest 50/50.
So you did all the work, somehow managed to fund it, worked on game for a year and got $155,000 while Valve made $252,000 for payment processing and CDN. Steam do not provide marketing - it only boost already successful products.
PS: This is best case scenario. Usually your publisher will also recoup whatever expenses they had on their end for marketing and whatever.
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