5 ms·

The reasulting reality of the managerless approach hasn’t been good. As the they say, “if you don’t have any managers you have politics”. I have several frien

• jsheard 2y ago
  For anyone who seeks to emulate Valves internal structure you have to ask yourself one question - do you already have a core product with a near-unimpeachable monopoly which consistently brings in enough money to keep the entire company afloat, with enough left over to bankroll moonshot R&D projects on top? If not, you can't afford to operate like Valve. They cancel 10 projects for every one they ship, if not for Steam bringing in endless billions of dollars they would have gone out of business a decade ago.
  • FrustratedMonky 2y ago
    So did they have a different structure before Steam existed? And then post-Steam, now there is total freedom to organize however they want? You're saying that this organization doesn't lead to success, but because they accidentally have a successful money maker, now they can run like this? I think there is disconnect here. There are successful companies that can operate like this, because this is a good way to get to success.
    • jsheard 2y ago
      Early Valve coasted on the money Gabe Newell personally made as a senior Microsoft executive, so if you want to emulate that Valve then you'll need to find 8 or 9 figures in your bank account without taking any outside investments, in order to keep the company completely untainted by shareholder influence. That's not a template most founders can follow either. There's a timeline where startup Valve went through the standard publisher funding model instead and got pressured into releasing the "finished but not very fun" 1997 cut of Half Life, rather than taking an entire extra year (an eternity in game development cycles of that era) to overhaul the whole game at their leisure. Things could have gone very differently right from the start.
  • ric2b 2y ago
    Steam isn't an unimpeachable monopoly, their competition is just so much worse.
    • nerdjon 2y ago
      I disagree, many of the competitors do what is necessary just fine. There is a strong sentiment with many gamers of just not wanting to use an alternative and it is basically a non starter for many other stores. Many complain about the very idea of not all of their games being in the same place. This isn't necessarily anything monopolistic done on Valve's side. But it would be very hard for another store to make any meaningful impact regardless of how they are.
      • Systemmanic 2y ago
        I agree. I’ve met countless gamers who will simply not buy or play a game if it isn’t available on Steam. Myself included, and all of my gamer friends.
        • nerdjon 2y ago
          I never really understood this mentality, especially when on the console side people seem just fine with the idea of buying multiple consoles for exclusives. (not that I am agreeing with that either). There isn't a cost to having multiple stores, you don't even need to keep them running at all time. I get the concerns over the Epic app, but Heroic exists. Personally I have games on Steam, Xbox (cross buy between xbox and PC), Epic, and EA. Plus Game Pass. The only annoying part is when I go to install or buy a game, finding where I have it or making sure I don't already own it somewhere. But there are launchers like Playnite to address that. But it does feel like I am in the minority with this opinion.
          • Systemmanic 2y ago
            One reason I’ve heard is the stats and Achievements consolidation. Cross play solves this somewhat but it’s not consistent. PC is my main platform but I also have an Xbox (NHL games not available on PC), everything else is on Steam. I wouldn’t buy a PS5 for an exclusive. TBH exclusivity is annoying and I don’t want to reward it.
  • Cyph0n 2y ago
    How is Steam a monopoly? The platform it runs on (Windows) is open, unlike the App Store. Competitors exist on said platform, including a store & game pass run by the platform owner. The fact that Steam still runs the show is a testament to their ability to just do things better than anyone else. Sure, there is a sort of network effect at play, but there is no other “moat” here - let alone a monopolistic one.
    • 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
      They are saying "Steam is a monopoly because they're so big", you are saying "Steam is not a monopoly because they're not anti-competitive", you're not disagreeing
      • Cyph0n 2y ago
        I am saying it’s not a monopoly at all because it’s a) not the only player in the PC games store market and b) has no mechanism in place to be able to enforce such a position even if it was.
        • Shekelphile 2y ago
          You can go back in history and apply that logic to any company and claim they weren't monopolies as a result. Standard oil and AT&T had plenty of competitors, none were able to grow beyond extremely small scale.
          • AlexCoventry 2y ago
            The key question is whether an antitrust target is engaging in uncompetitive practices. I haven't noticed any claims of Steam/Valve using uncompetitive practices (but I could have simply missed them.)
            • j_maffe 2y ago
              Whether something is a monopoly and whether they've abused it in such a way that they should be struck with an antitrust suit are two different things. I don't think many would argue that Steam abused its monopoly.
  • quohort 2y ago
    Steam isn't a monopoly. I, and everyone I know who uses steam is familiar with GOG or Epic games or Battle.net or some other service. You can even distribute your game independently (e.g. in the case of minecraft and some of the most successful PC games of all time) or just distribute it as a web game (increasingly feasible as WebGL, WebGPU, WASM etc. continue to advance). Steam is successful because it has good user experience compared to alternatives, and has a lot of major titles.
  • mmanfrin 2y ago
    > near-unimpeachable monopoly The failures of other companies trying to emulate or capture that market do not a monopoly make. There is no real moat for Steam beyond customer loyalty and the fact that nearly every competitor sought to gain market through anti-consumer moves (exclusivity) rather than value-adds, and almost universally with shittier software to boot. There are a few notable counterexamples (GoG is a good store, value add, respectful of customers; but just didn't have the juice to establish itself beyond indie/abandonware games; Itch.io is doing fine in its niche). Just because customers prefer a product does not mean it's got an unimpeachable moat.
  • kibibu 2y ago
    They had this structure before Steam
• thrwaway1985882 2y ago
  It's hard - I'd say impossible for most people - to be simultaneously excellent at the organization and (yes,) politics that go into managing the output of a company, and the execution that goes into developing and operating the systems of a company. They both take effort because they are both real jobs. Add a bit of arrogance in the mix and you get devs thinking their managers are worthless and managers thinking their teams are useless.
• candiddevmike 2y ago
  Valve's approach to managerless is closer to anarchy. You can add more accountability/structure with better results while still being managerless, such as in a holacracy. Politics exist in any corporate structure. I'm not sure what's worse though, Valve's tribe-based politics or your traditional corporate game of thrones politics.
• jacobsenscott 2y ago
  You always have politics. Managers tend to be political ninjas, so they make it worse. I've been programming professionally for over 25 years at this point, worked at many places, and I couldn't tell you what value a manager brings. I know what they do - which is hold meetings that take time away from real work, and ask people "is it done yet". But I've never seen anything get done faster or better as a result of something a manager did. I'm genuinely curious to hear from people who have had what they consider effective management, what did the manager do to make your work better?
  • prepend 2y ago
    The best managers I’ve had provide support- good workspaces, training budgets, protection from layoffs, hiring good coworkers. Basically making it so no admin work comes to me and everything goes smoothly.
    • amy-petrik-214 2y ago
      Exactly - they are political ninjas, yes, but they ethically view themselves as the feudal lord super-samurai whose job it is to defend and develop all the young paduan samurai under his watch. Nothing wrong with politics if done in a kind, ethical, "win friends and influence people" kind of way
  • sdmcelroy 2y ago
    I've had good managers make decisions to steer the effort efficiently. Also, they can act as tie breakers in disputes so that reasonableness can previal.
  • jcranmer 2y ago
    One of the best roles of a good manager is insulating their employees from the political bullshit that goes on above them. One example that happened to a coworker of mine is that something happened in an open source project they were the maintainer of that caused VP-level executives to blow up at him, so the manager told them to take they day off and let him deal with angry executives instead.
  • 2y ago
• ants_everywhere 2y ago
  > As the they say, “if you don’t have any managers you have politics”. This reminds me of the classic essay "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
• thih9 2y ago
  > Google tried this, notoriously dense grating and then firing basically all the managers at an all-hands. That didn’t work out well at all... When did this happen? Sounds absurd. I’d love to read more if anyone has a postmortem or other sources.
  • Balinares 2y ago
    It wasn't "Google", it was Larry, apparently on a whim of the moment. It wasn't managers in general, it was project managers. And as I understand it, the project managers were called right back in, so Google was actually never run without them. That happened in 2001, and is arguably the reason Eric stepped up to take the reins from him.
• modeless 2y ago
  If you measure success by how happy your most disgruntled employees are, maybe it doesn't look good. But if you measure success by revenue, profit, or quality of products, it looks incredible. Valve has succeeded in a very competitive industry and consistently released top quality products over a period of almost three decades. I don't buy people's excuses about them just exploiting a monopoly. Epic was gunning for them, Microsoft was gunning for them, all the big publishers tried to compete on PC game distribution, consoles try to take market share from PC, GoG and others exist. The failure of their competitors to unseat them doesn't mean Valve had it easy. Google, on the other hand, is what you get when you try to optimize for employee happiness across the board. Their business has been successful (the monopoly argument seems more applicable in this case, at least in the last decade), but product quality is in the toilet and employee happiness ultimately couldn't be maintained in the face of bureaucracy and layoffs.
  • kevingadd 2y ago
    It's important to recognize however that Valve has a history of being very slow to ship product, and financially is supported by the existence of Steam alongside lootbox bonanzas like CS:Go and DOTA 2. Those are successful products, so by no measure is Valve a failed company, but compared to most other successful game studios their ability to ship a completed product is very poor - if you look at their track record, they release a few full-size games per decade and then some of them end up failing. Comparable studios with their staffing and budget can typically release double their number of games without whiffing on quality - look at From Software, for example, which delivers hit after hit with ~equivalent staffing on smaller timelines and smaller budgets. It's true that a product shipped early is bad forever, but a product never shipped is certainly not a success by any metric either. My suspicion is that the way the studio runs means that the stuff they eventually ship is high quality, but a lot of potential smash hits wither and die because of process dysfunction and staff attrition. On the other hand, if you're a successful middleman taking 30% of everyone else's revenue, you don't really need to be good at making games anymore. You can leave that business if you want.
    • jchw 2y ago
      Unlike most other middlemen that take revenue though, people legitimately are willing to choose to pay Valve on both sides of the transaction, despite a relatively level playing field. I choose Steam when I don't have to, even if it costs more, because the service is simply the best. I like what I get from Steam. Pending the lawsuit about anti-competitive behavior, which I think would definitely harm the argument that people simply prefer Steam a great deal, I honestly do generally just believe Steam actually does bring enough value to justify the relatively high price tag. I actually also believe that Google Play and Apple App Store as marketplaces also provide "enough value" to potentially justify a fairly high price tag, but in their case it's not actually fair because the problem is that nobody else is even allowed to try to provide similar value at any cost. For example, both Google and Apple provide "free" push notification infrastructure, which is sort of necessary: if everyone was running push notification infrastructure, it would be pretty bad for battery life. However, the net effect is that you're being forced to price all of the value that they provide as platforms, into their marketplace, whether or not your app needs or wants their "value", and that's the problem. This doesn't quite compare to the situation with Steam, and I think that warrants more recognition. Frankly, Steam sucked ass when it first came around. It was relentlessly mocked, and the only reason people tolerated it was because you needed it to play Half Life 2. But... they never stopped improving it. And frankly, even if this makes Valve a "worse" company from a position of investors and onlookers, it has made Valve a better company for consumers to be able to trust. It's pretty obvious that not every product or service Valve puts out is fantastic, but in the same token that things which are easy at "normal" companies are impossible at Valve, things that are impossible at normal companies appear to be possible at Valve. I hate to romanticize it too much, but I'm not even a huge gamer, and I still feel like Valve has done very well by most of their consumers and developers. If anything, the biggest trouble they seem to have is deciding how exactly to moderate/censor the Steam store, given all of the different external pressures. Now that is a tough problem and they've had a tough time figuring it out.
• grouchomarx 2y ago
  "if you don’t have any managers you have politics. and if you do have any managers, you also have politics"
• 015a 2y ago
  > things that normal companies do successfully are impossible at Valve. By "things" do you mean "build an even moderately successful PC game distribution platform"? Because no one else has managed to do that. Epic, EA, Xbox, Ubisoft, and a dozen others have tried, none of them reached 10% the popularity of Steam, and if they still exist today its because they have one keystone game keeping them alive. Or, by "things" do they mean "make successful games"? Because Valve does that too; they produce games that have far more and longer success than most publishers. They've had failed projects, sure; its funny how when projects fail in hierarchically structured companies, as they do every day, we just put our hands up, retro it, and move on; but when they fail at Valve it has to be because they don't have managers, right? Do your friends mean "be profitable"? Couldn't be that; Valve is tremendously profitable by any account. Highly productive? No... they're also that. Loved by customers? Strike three, Valve also checks that box. I guess you could argue that "things" means "build twenty different directly competing messaging apps". Got me there, Google's army of managers did manage to do that when Valve couldn't.
  • fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
    Valve's largest game, CS2, is still full of bugs and almost unplayable on valve servers due to lack of a working anti-cheat. They even removed existing anti-cheat features such as the overwatch system that allowed players to review games for potential cheating. They also removed a lot of the game modes and maps. Coasting on being a marketplace (where they also had first mover advantage) shouldn't score valve any points for the topic at hand, which is about their ability to get things done. CS2 is "successful" in that they run a gambling site and marketplace within the game that brings them a lot of money.[0] But they are also slowly killing their game and have ignored it for over a year. The best thing Valve has done in recent years is the steam deck. Their games are not getting better and my guess is Deadlock will end up closer to Artifact in reception than CS or Dota. [0] https://store.steampowered.com/charts/topselling/global https://store.steampowered.com/charts/topselling/global - in top 100 games by revenue for 12 years
    • 015a 2y ago
      Deadlock is already within 10k of Artifact's all time peak player count; and it "legally" doesn't exist and is closed invite only [1] [2]. So, you can guess whatever you want; no one in their right mind would assert that a hero-based shooter MOBA will achieve similar levels of success as a card game. But maybe you're not in your right mind. As for Counterstrike 2; I'll believe anything you're rambling about actually matters when it spends just 24 hours outside of the top 5 most played games on Steam. Its #2 right now. Dota is #3. You're welcome to channel Trump and argue that they're cooking the books on their player-counts, but that's about the only argument you've got that has any chance of being right. [1] https://steamdb.info/app/1422450/charts/ https://steamdb.info/app/1422450/charts/ [2] https://steamdb.info/app/583950/charts/ https://steamdb.info/app/583950/charts/
• ErikBjare 2y ago
  Feminist in the 80s tried the leaderless approach, which led to the seminal work "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" that addresses this.