Gabe Newell on Valve's business model | Hacker News Reader

Gabe Newell on Valve's business model

develop-online.net

96 pointstanoku28 comments

What I love about Valve is how little bullshit comes out of there.

Gabe's talking about how much everyone loves working at Valve, and what a great environment it is, and with so many companies you'd know that was just spin for the interview. Having involved Valve in a few things I've done in the past, their staff really are loving their jobs, and everyone I've dealt with there, from support technicians up to executives, just lets that fact leak out of them, all the time. It even makes it enjoyable to work with them.

"But, seriously, if fifty awesome people knocked on the door, we’d hire them all. We don’t hire to specific positions, we hire to standards."

This is how Andrew Carnegie ran his companies. He didn't hire when he needed employees, he hired when he found someone worth hiring. And then he would find them a job to do.

It's interesting to see this particular hiring strategy applied in companies with such extraordinarily different structures otherwise.

From the article: "So, in practice, a really likable person in our community should get Dota 2 for free, because of past behavior in Team Fortress 2. Now, a real jerk that annoys everyone, they can still play, but a game is full price and they have to pay an extra hundred dollars if they want voice."

Wow, if this gets successfully implemented I can't wait! Especially the part about a jerk having to pay an extra hundred bucks for voice! haha

That would probably make COD/MW playable.

I found the game really enjoyable when I did not have to listen to people making remarks about my playing...by lowering the voice volume all the way. It also saved me from having to listen to random strains of someone's music or breathing.

My problem with it (to various levels on other games, but COD/MW is the worst) is that you really need to communicate with your team in these games. Unfortunately, you are likely to hear hundreds of extremely racist and homophobic slurs in a single gaming session. When you're not being subjected to the dregs of society through their racism, you're having your ear drums blown out by ten year old kids screaming random noise into the microphone (because they can, I guess) or teenagers rapping or playing music loudly like they're a fucking DJ. Oh, and don't forget the jackholes who can't be bothered to mute their mic, so we all get to listen to their forty minute conversations with someone on their cell phone.

They need to require DOB for an account on consoles (guess you can't do much about it on PC) and then give people an option to say "don't match me in games with people under the age of X". The 360 has an option that lets you choose what "community" you want to be part of, but it ignores it completely. If it actually worked, it should keep the twelve year olds playing with the twelve year olds. Not that half the racists and inane idiots aren't in their 20s and 30s, of course. . . :/

I've pretty much refused playing on public servers now (on the PC of course), and just stuck to a serious semi-roleplaying community focused on shooters, because of exactly this.

Sony PSN has taken care of that for us already.

Honestly I find all the idiots on COD rather funny. It's especially funny when they accuse me of cheating just because they're bad at the game.

I loved it, too. But I doubt the idea with the penalties could work very well. You want high value with low entrance costs. As long as you can sign up anonymously you can't get rid of the jerks.

If your purchase of the game is tied to a Steam account, that should work. You'd have to make a new Steam account to avoid these penalties... probably actually a bigger hassle than it sounds, since which account you're logged in as determines which games you can make a snap-decision to play.

We constantly ask ourselves the question, how can we make our fans happy every day, and what are the different ways we can do that.

Ship Half-Life 2 Episode 3 already, that's how!

edit: pstack makes an excellent point. Instead, perhaps I should say "Ship something with 'Half-Life' and '3' in the title already, that's how!" :)

I suspect that will never happen. At this point, I'm almost certain whatever they release will just be titled HL3.

I disagree, I'd vastly prefer a good episode 3 than an early episode 3. Valve has always sacrificed time for quality, and it's the sacrifice that allows them to be great.

One the most impressive aspects to this interview is Gabe's lack of dogmatic prognostication. They're not into something because "mobile is the future" or "the PC is dead" or "social gaming is taking over the world." They're looking into things because they seem like a good idea, but it's clear that they're equally open to discovering that they weren't that great an idea after all.

That last part - a form of idea edit and review - is something that I see a lot of companies lose very quickly. They get so caught up in what they think they should be doing (or how they define themselves, e.g. "we are a social media company") that they lose the ability to let go of ideas that just don't work, even when it seems like they should. Apple is really good at this. For every product that Apple actually announces, there are hundreds that never make it off the ground. The iPad idea had been floating around Apple for years, but it wasn't approved until mobile technology had come far enough to make it actually a practical idea, not just a good idea.

There's a saying that behind every great poet is a great editor. I suggest that behind every great tech company is (at least one) great idea editor.

Valve consistently anger or frustrate their core fanbase (e.g. the hot-air boycott over Left 4 Dead 2, the almost decade-long whining about Counterstrike game mechanics, and of course the frustration over HL3 / HL2:ep3).

But the fans never seem to leave, and their zealousness and numbers only ever grow. Even with the historically poor SDK support and release cycle, there's still has a solid, active modding community even as the Source engine starts to look a little tired.

And at the same time they're pioneering digital game publishing and distribution, providing really interesting services to their competitors (Steamworks), pushing the frontiers of their core game niches, and are astoundingly profitable.

That's an amazing example to aspire to.

The reason Valve doesn't lose angry and frustrated fans is because it's anger and frustration over something they love. It's the "damn it, why are there only six episodes of Walking Dead in the first season and then I have to wait another year?!" kind of anger and frustration, for the most part. That's the kind of reaction most companies would give anything for.

Every time I read or hear more about the internals of Valve, I want to be their employee more and more.

That sounds like a really great place to work and a good guy to work for.

Any place that has stuff like 'Valve Time' : http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Time posted in the same public wiki as 'Lag Compensation': http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source_Multiplayer_N... seems like a good culture mix.

They care, we win. There are some losing edge cases, the lack of Source SDK on Mac is the only thing I would use Windows for. There are so many content producers on Macs, so much could be done with a cross platform SDK (plus we'd get another 20 free games).

Really great interview! Thanks for posting this. I love how he seems to care about his employees health. Taking everyone and their family to Hawaii once a year sounds not just great but smart also.

Do they really pay some gamers 20k per week? I haven't played online games in years but my first thought was "This can't work for Valve. How can a gamer produce so much value for the community in a FPS." But then again, people were making tons of many back in the days of UO and Diablo II by selling virtual items. So, these people already provided a value for hard money, too.

Valve isn't making a decision to pay a specific player 20k a week, it's merely a consequence of the economy system that Valve has created. It's the players paying other players 20k a week, not Valve per se.

Thanks for clarifying! I used Steam when it came out but didn't know about this feature.

I love the concept of different monetezation strategies for different types of players. That's a game-changer (pun!). Love to watch how it's executed.

I was beginning to think Valve's business model was to never ever get around to releasing the next Half Life. :)

"how can we make our fans happy every day..."

Don't fuck with me Gabe put out HL2 Episode 3 already!!

TLDR; I'm just going to assume that hats in TF2 makes up 90% of their profit.

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