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Surprising amount of discussion on work/life balance and kids/family for a game dev. Is Valve known for this or is it just relative?
by piker 1y ago
Surprising amount of discussion on work/life balance and kids/family for a game dev. Is Valve known for this or is it just relative?
- scrollaway 1y agoValve is not an ordinary company. They make a ton of money, have no outside investment, reinvest everything internally on R&D and keep very small. On top of that, they run completely flat management. 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.
- keyringlight 1y agoEven at the start they were unusual as they were funded by Microsoft millionaires, and presumably had little pressure to release before "when it's done", and HL1 being a huge hit started the ball rolling allowing them to acquire the team fortress and counter-strike mod teams, picking up even more momentum.
- Hamuko 1y agoArguably by 2012, Valve was already transitioning out of the game development business and into the services business. Team Fortress 2 was already out, Left 4 Dead 2 was already out, Portal 2 was already out, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive came out in the same year, and Dota 2 came out the next year. Really the only things that have been made since that period are Half-Life: Alyx (2020), Counter-Strike 2 (2023) and Deadlock (TBA).
- Strom 1y agoThey didn't transition out of game development. Dota 2 was under heavy development all these years after it "came out". It was only when Deadlock started heavy development that Dota 2 was winding down.
- nvarsj 1y agoEveryone forgets about Artifact :).
- ThatPlayer 1y agoAlso Underlords.
- Hamuko 1y agoI think even Valve would prefer you to forget about it.
- JackMorgan 1y agoDota Underlords came out since then, which is a brilliant game that they effectively abandoned / moved on to Deadlock.
- SXX 1y agoGamedev is just very poor industry. Think of your usual FAANG salary and divide it by 5. Or just any random software engineer job and devide salary by 2. There are companies like Epic Games that pay competetive salaries, but they are few. 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.