Jeri Ellsworth has been quite vivid about the actual, rather than the idealized, version of how Valve actually works; there's some thoughts here: http://www.dev

Jeri Ellsworth has been quite vivid about the actual, rather than the idealized, version of how Valve actually works; there's some thoughts here: http://www.develop-online.net/news/valve-s-perfect-hiring-hierarchy-has-hidden-management-clique-like-high-school/0115316 http://www.develop-online.net/news/valve-s-perfect-hiring-hi... Besides shelving the VR project that she was reportedly working on, there's also the Steambox which still doesn't exist (the only hardware to even pass prototype stage eventually had to abandon SteamOS and release on its own), the utter crapshoot that is their attempts at virtual economies (TF2 hats: prints money, trading cards: useless boondoggle, everything involving Counter-Strike: possibly lucrative now, but PR disaster after PR disaster with their fans). Valve spins the utopian image, and generally keeps the veil down enough that goodwill and fandom manage to sustain the myth, but I suspect the cart's been off the rails for sometime, and if it weren't for Steam we'd have long seen a very public failure by now.