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Comment by ziffusion | Hacker News Reader

> We sort of had to collectively admit we were wrong on the premise that you will be happiest if you work on something you personally want to work on the most

What do they say about this? What is it that they found that invalidated this "premise"? I can't seem to find anything in the article.

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I think it's almost certainly going to lead to a bunch of prototypes and half finished games, which is very fun. Finishing projects is not.

Ultimately though, jumping between a bunch of cancelled projects is not fulfilling and likely to lead to burn out in the long run.

I wonder whether that means that The Valley of Gods will eventually be finished... or to the contrary, not at all.

This is a game which was being developed by a studio called Campo Santo. The devs were hired by Valve, but they could still work on their game at Valve. At some point, the devs were really happy (based on their social media accounts) to switch and devote all their time to Half-Life Alyx instead, and the development of their original game was put on an indefinite hold. Now that Half-Life Alyx was released, what does that quote imply for The Valley of Gods?

I'm still mad about Campo Santo. I couldn't give two shits about Alyx or Half-Life or any other of Valve's games. But they had to consume one of the most promising story-focused indie studios and relegate them to making games I just have zero interest in, and don't have anything really interesting to say or let you experience about the human condition. Firewatch felt like a real story about real people. Alyx et al are just completely different genres. Now we're never going to get another Campo Santo game and it's a significant loss for gaming culture.

I really relate to this. I LOVED Fire Watch. It was absolutely stunning.

I really don't see why it wouldn't. Unless all those devs quickly switch to the next Half-Life game in the works, why would they not go back to working on Valley of Gods, which seems pretty far along?

Also, if you accept that Valve no longer runs on "work on what you want", as you imply, it means people will be forced to work on and finish that game.

The fact that the store page still exist and is up (which is more than you can say for any unfinished Valve project) gives a clear sign that they still plan to finish it.

The implication is that Valley is not in Valve's genre wheelhouse, as it isn't an FPS (or even a modified puzzle FPS like Portal; Valley would not have been expected to have a gun at all), isn't expected to have the audience scale or demographics Valve typically targets, and only exists at Valve because it was IP of what was presumably only an acquihire (underscored by the fact that they immediately moved the team to Alyx). Even if Valve now thinks they'll force games to finish, it seems unlikely that Valley would be a priority from above in Valve "management".

I wonder if they will ever collectively admit that building a profit center out of gambling for children was not a great idea, despite the rewards it brought them.

What, specifically, are you talking about? isn't Valve loaded because of Steam?

They are even more loaded because of the loot boxes in CS:GO, DotA 2 and TF2.

Debatable. DotA 2 yields around $100m revenue annually, a quarter of which goes to funding tournament prize pools. From the remainder, they have tournament organising costs, developer salaries, server costs and so on. I’m sure it’s profitable at the end of the day, just not the main source of their profit.

A bigger source of their profit is taking 30% of most PC gaming revenue with minimal overhead. This was such a money spinner that other game publishers eventually got wise to it and started their own stores. But Steam is still the big dog here.

What? I'd be surprised if that was only 100m.

Every TI, the prize pool surpasses 25m. Which means that just by buying compendiums and treasures, people have already paid 100m (25% is contributed towards the prize pool).

There's also multiple compendiums per year, or battle passes or whatever depending on the year.

And there's a lot of random loot box releases, Arcana items etc.

On top of that, Valve extracts an extra 10% (or is it 15%) of the trade value of every item that gets sold through the steam market. And those items are sold and bought A LOT.

Whilst it is somewhat difficult to find up to date information, it looks like DotA 2 yields somewhere north [1] of $18M/month [0] in revenue, which is more than double the number you've referenced here.

Not to suggest that a good slice of Valve's profits don't come from Steam, but they still make a reasonable amount from individual games.

[0] That's a 2015 figure, with suggestions it has increased since then: https://venturebeat.com/2015/03/24/dota-2-makes-18m-per-mont...

[1] In 2017 it was possibly more than double that figure: https://www.superdataresearch.com/market-data/market-brief-y...

My feeling from the article was that people just jumped on the hot new thing, because let’s be honest “new” or generally more interesting than “old”. That could easily be a source of projects spinning up, taking devs from other projects(dooming them), and then in a full circle leaving to join whatever new project had come up.

Eg, if the direction is always “work on whatever you find fun right now” you run into problems ever actually finishing anything. Which matches what happens in my ~/Projects folder quite well :)

A common theme I heard from internal sources was that they had serious issues with software quality because nobody wanted to do the difficult work of fixing bugs, addressing security vulnerabilities, etc. As a result someone eventually had to be pressured into doing it, but now they weren't really doing what they were passionate about and they'd catch criticism for not being Passionate or doing Highly Impactful Work.

If nobody fixes the security holes in Steam's overlay sandbox and protocol handler, every single person with Steam installed gets a crypto-locker installed. The old Valve model didn't really have incentives to encourage people to do the hard work necessary to achieve those fixes, especially if that hard work was interfering with other people's fun.

I gathered it was because the result of this strategy was a failure.

To be specific, it was a failure because, as they point out, they basically did not finish any games for the entirety of the 2010's. The ebook goes into all the projects they worked on that lead nowhere, and the lack of focus/direction that resulted from the "work on what you want".

Here's a counter example. Just watch this guy working on "something he personally wants to work on the most". [1]

1: https://www.youtube.com/user/wintergatan2000

Is it really the case that people were unhappy?

I seriously doubt it. It's rather it was a very poor business decision as people didn't want to do the boring, but very necessary, work.

Probably not wrong about you being happiest that way, but wrong about it being a good way to run a company.

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