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Overall, I think Valve is a good place to work, and I learned a lot from all of the incredibly smart people there. The main reason that I left was the difficult

by bkraz 10y ago

Overall, I think Valve is a good place to work, and I learned a lot from all of the incredibly smart people there. The main reason that I left was the difficulty in merging hardware development with the company's exceptionally successful business model. The hardware team was pressured to give away lots of IP that could have been licensed, with the explanation that hardware is just so worthless anyway compared to online software sales, there was no other choice. It's possible that this was a good faith gamble, however it still doesn't preclude the use of business contracts that would have protected our investment. It also isn't so great for morale to hear everyday that your years of work are going to be given away to another company, and then watch that company get acquired for $2B. This is especially the case since many employees strongly voiced concerns about just such a scenario. Growth at Valve is a little funny. It's like an oil-rich nation. Gaining more citizens is not really desirable since the wealth will just get spread more thinly, and there is no way that new employees will be able to make more money than Steam already does with a very limited number of employees. I know the company is trying new things, and making honest investments in new areas, but it's hard to shake the bottom line.

shostack 10y ago
Personally I think there is a ton of growth potential for Steam that has yet to be realized. I wonder if the revenue is making Valve soft since it tends to hide many problems that scrappier companies are forced to confront and solve or perish.
shostack 10y ago
Personally I think there is a ton of growth potential for Steam that has yet to be realized. I wonder if all the revenue is making Valve soft since it tends to hide many problems that scrappier companies are forced to confront and solve or perish.
dleslie 10y ago
Sounds like Valve lacks direction.
- devwastaken 10y ago
  If you look at how Amazon has been buying up Twitch.tv, Curse, and now are experimenting with having a Twitch game downloader, you see how far behind Steam is with the times. Valve makes ridiculous amounts of money, has no board, Gabe Newell can do whatever he wants with the company. I think he's really taken a retired seat. Steam's social platform is lacking, the technology behind it all is old (Just look a the steam API), and they aren't investing into anything. Even customer support is majorly lacking. The second Amazon starts selling games, its game over. They can advertise their client and services through twitch, and connect games and players back to twitch and the Curse client. Thats the triangle of doom to competitors, where you control the product, the platform and the community. They have it all in the bag, and it was so blindingly obvious.
  - Vraxx 10y ago
    I really dislike Curse for gaming, the UI is the most unintuitive thing I've used in ages, showing me the same information on 5 different looking screens, but not having a single screen that shows me a list of all of my friends. I don't use any of their addons as well because I don't want to bundle myself into a glorified chat app that can't even handle that correctly. I've had to restart not only curse, but my entire machine multiple times in order to get it to register a microphone switch or a switch in playback devices. I agree with your main point of steam's slow movement, but the other thing is that steam is a very large incumbent with pretty high switching costs. I don't see them going away because a different platform offers twitch integration, because I can already stream twitch with my steam library that has hundreds of games in it. And if twitch limited that somehow, I think the pull of the user's library would overpower the pull of one individual streaming platform. It costs a lot more to switch the library after all.
  - drzaiusapelord 10y ago
    >Even customer support is majorly lacking. I have probably refunded 10 games in the past year or so for various reasons. I've gotten sales and deals unimaginable before the days of steam. I can't imagine any other company letting me get away with such things. Arguably, we have the EU to thank for that, but Valve has zero obligation to allow this policy for US customers like me, but did so anyway. > I think he's really taken a retired seat. From my reading of recent VR history, he's fairly hands on with it. I did read an interview where he claims he purposely puts himself in the backseat because he didn't want to become "King of Valve" where his personal taste and ideas trump everyone else's. He something of the anti-Jobs. >Valve makes ridiculous amounts of money, has no board, Gabe Newell can do whatever he wants with the company. Privately held companies have different pros and cons than publicly held ones. I can't imagine Valve being a better company as a public entity. Think of all the investor-minded decisions (must hit certain milestones, projections, etc) that have doomed gaming companies in the past. Valve is largely immune to that, but as you say, comes with the price of being fairly slow moving compared to their peers.

by bkraz 10y ago

shostack 10y ago

Personally I think there is a ton of growth potential for Steam that has yet to be realized. I wonder if the revenue is making Valve soft since it tends to hide many problems that scrappier companies are forced to confront and solve or perish.

shostack 10y ago

Personally I think there is a ton of growth potential for Steam that has yet to be realized. I wonder if all the revenue is making Valve soft since it tends to hide many problems that scrappier companies are forced to confront and solve or perish.

dleslie 10y ago

Sounds like Valve lacks direction.

devwastaken 10y ago
If you look at how Amazon has been buying up Twitch.tv, Curse, and now are experimenting with having a Twitch game downloader, you see how far behind Steam is with the times. Valve makes ridiculous amounts of money, has no board, Gabe Newell can do whatever he wants with the company. I think he's really taken a retired seat. Steam's social platform is lacking, the technology behind it all is old (Just look a the steam API), and they aren't investing into anything. Even customer support is majorly lacking. The second Amazon starts selling games, its game over. They can advertise their client and services through twitch, and connect games and players back to twitch and the Curse client. Thats the triangle of doom to competitors, where you control the product, the platform and the community. They have it all in the bag, and it was so blindingly obvious.
- Vraxx 10y ago
  I really dislike Curse for gaming, the UI is the most unintuitive thing I've used in ages, showing me the same information on 5 different looking screens, but not having a single screen that shows me a list of all of my friends. I don't use any of their addons as well because I don't want to bundle myself into a glorified chat app that can't even handle that correctly. I've had to restart not only curse, but my entire machine multiple times in order to get it to register a microphone switch or a switch in playback devices. I agree with your main point of steam's slow movement, but the other thing is that steam is a very large incumbent with pretty high switching costs. I don't see them going away because a different platform offers twitch integration, because I can already stream twitch with my steam library that has hundreds of games in it. And if twitch limited that somehow, I think the pull of the user's library would overpower the pull of one individual streaming platform. It costs a lot more to switch the library after all.
- drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  >Even customer support is majorly lacking. I have probably refunded 10 games in the past year or so for various reasons. I've gotten sales and deals unimaginable before the days of steam. I can't imagine any other company letting me get away with such things. Arguably, we have the EU to thank for that, but Valve has zero obligation to allow this policy for US customers like me, but did so anyway. > I think he's really taken a retired seat. From my reading of recent VR history, he's fairly hands on with it. I did read an interview where he claims he purposely puts himself in the backseat because he didn't want to become "King of Valve" where his personal taste and ideas trump everyone else's. He something of the anti-Jobs. >Valve makes ridiculous amounts of money, has no board, Gabe Newell can do whatever he wants with the company. Privately held companies have different pros and cons than publicly held ones. I can't imagine Valve being a better company as a public entity. Think of all the investor-minded decisions (must hit certain milestones, projections, etc) that have doomed gaming companies in the past. Valve is largely immune to that, but as you say, comes with the price of being fairly slow moving compared to their peers.