Writer wants to make Portal 3, but Valve's 'flat structure' makes it a challenge
pcgamer.com
pcgamer.com
It seems counterintuitive: if there’s money to be had, go get it. But there’s a cognitive load and time sink at the senior management levels. Why bother us with this idea for a game that represents 1% of our annual profit if successful?
I feel a possible answer to this is to create a “prestige” studio that is more focused on fortifying your brand rather than profit. And I feel that what’s needed is full autonomy. Blizzard or Valve can wholly own this studio, but there is no cross-resourcing. Hire a passionate team, give them IPs to tenderly care for, and then leave them the ^%#* alone.
It’s like going to Google and wanting to only work on search. It’s an ads company.
That's been proven untrue by the MBAs and the market. Google no longer creates good products, but the ad dollars flow more and more. People still significantly use Google search.
I'm of the belief that that's purely inertia - That Google was so successful at it's products that even though they're losing steam fast, they're still good products for now, but that they're gonna see a steep dive soon and not be able to recover.
Or if they’re not superior they’re not inferior.
Whereas when I use other search engines I have the nagging feeling I’m missing better information on Google.
Are you though?
I've been using DDG for years now as my primary search engine.
When I started, I used !g quite often precisely because of that feeling. These days I have a hard time even remembering to try it when a search is unfruitful.
The reason being that it became less and less useful, and these days even when I do remember trying it, it generally doesn't add anything useful to my results.
So it couldn't just be called Valve or Blizzard, it'd have to be called something else.
If they do it right though, some interesting things could come from it. VW's high end is always full of parts that started life on an Audi and they learned to make more cheaply over time.
I failed the interview, badly imho, I should have brushed up my C more, but even then I wasn't aware of the correct standard for OSS C development . Now I am (thx Vlc for the best 'how to contribute' documentation). Anyway, great experience, didn't feel like a big company, kind enough to explain my mistakes (this show trust imho), I love my current job but I would definitely try to interview again in like 5 years.
Definitely felt like a small company though, where the project leader is actually the recruiter. I'm not sure if the issue is the lack of available devs rather than the structure.
Someone in a Reddit thread pointed how Valve's structure reduces the fragility of a product by not basing it on one vision and that their games are based on a pretty pure collaborative effort. A writer becomes inherently less influential on the final product, but their individual contribution is more passionate and worked. One could argue for hours about the approach, but I think the results speak for themselves.
I think abstraction is key. There's gotta be a happy medium between absolute control or almost a sense of worship and not allowing a singular person to guide the ship.
A BDFL is great if the dictator is competent. A committee is also great if the committee is competent (overall).
Most people don't have what it takes to be a BDFL. But a few do. And for those people, the answer is to take good notes and get the hell out of their way.
Basically he claims that even though there's a flat corporate structure within Valve, in practice an implicit management structure arose in which those with the most political clout controlled others without it. Plus they used stack ranking at the time.
The implicit hidden hierarchies - based partly on charisma and friendship - increased the effort to do anything, and especially the mental stress of having to keep the double-think alive.
I think for less socially adept people these companies are a nightmare. The entire direction of the company was decided by a cliquie implicit power holders with no accountability, as these could always play on the "flat structure and we all share responsibility and accountability"
The current best example of this small team methodology is Stardew Valley.
But 1 < 20.
With recent advancements in design and tooling, this could be a possibility again.
You're ideas are less likely to be vetoed, but good like finding a champion other than yourself.
But I think that it's probably exaggerated - there are always hierarchies, but in this case no attempt has been made to define or force the structure.
I think that the bigger issue is this: Valve is a platform and distribution company, not a games company.
As the platform became the primary product, broad artistic creativity took a backseat.
I don't see it coming back, which is a pity - The Orange Box was exquisite.
Seems like a remarkably valuable piece of IP to not regularly exploit.
I would like a new Left 4 Dead though...
Let's be honest with ourselves: they got bored with it, made more money doing something else, and by the time anyone looked back were heavily intimidated by the expectations on them that doing a sequel to the beloved games was too scary. No matter what they put out, there will be a non-trivial portion of the fan base rabidly upset with it.
The "flat structure" means unless someone is willing to have the guts to push hard enough, there will never be consensus on what is likely regarded as a radioactive topic.
This goes for Half-Life, Portal, and really anything else that isn't a potentially large multi-player IP that could seemingly become its own platform, like Counter-Strike or Dota.
There's of course also the problem that you have to rally people to you to work on something, and people suck, frankly. Just because those people work at Valve doesn't mean they suck less in terms of human nature. It just means they also have technical chops.
From everything you can read about Valve in the media to what you can observe from their own releases, they seem to be a victim of their own success and being an individual contributor at Valve seems like you have organization-level and individual-level issues keeping you from being productive. Primarily around compensation.
There will never be a conclusion to the Half-Life series outside of what Marc Laidlaw gave fans. I doubt Erik Wolpaw will make a dent, not because I don't want him to, but because there are probably egos at Valve and pay incentives preventing him and others from delivering sequels that fans want.
What I mean by that is that producing flagship cars is not always driven purely by sales. Often it is driven by something else, like producing a homologation special, competing with another manufacturer, or just sheer excessiveness.
Maybe the economics don't add up, but I would like to see the big players mindset shift from 'make the most money' to 'show up our competitors and have fun'. Movies too, if I'm honest.
Meanwhile, you have smaller, lower-budget productions for whom the only chance of market success is making art that appeals greatly enough to some people that the game or movie expands by word of mouth and critical acclaim.
For specific examples, I'd point out Devolver Digital's catalog in games, and A24's portfolio of films.
Hell, Portal should have its own freakin' franchise, let Erik Wolpaw be the Keving Feige of Portalco, serve pink frosted cake for lunch every day.
To put it another way: go out on top.
An external dev house could also side-step any cultural/NIH issues. Valve is basically married to the Source game engine, but it is far, far behind what Unreal Engine is capable of these days. A third party with Unreal experience could whip up a gorgeous-looking Portal or Half Life game, and not have to have arguments with Valve insiders about which game engine is being used.
There are so many people who want to work in games that there's a sometimes toxic codependency between management and new employees. People will put up with a lot of shit to work at these places.
That makes it difficult for those of us who mostly work outside of games to draw conclusions and parallels to our own corners of the industry. People just don't feel that way about a lot of other things.
Many of those kids, now educated programmers and IT folks, would give anything to work at Valve. "Just happy to be on the team".
It's also a well known tool with a very, very large userbase -- not a bad line to have on a resume.
I’m not surprised that people don’t follow someone who is just there part-time…
I would be doubly surprised if this person were surprised.
Valve doesn't mass produce games, but always tries to bring some innovation. And if you would be lacking that would it make sense to just make sequel for sake of sequel?
Maybe it's just a matter of getting used to it?
I would looove to try moving VR games with an omni-treadmill some time!
Why would it being controller-friendly be a problem for MnK players?
A: Force console users to use a half thought out clunky pc interface
Or
B: Force PC users to go through a labrynth of ini files and menus because "well all the other platforms you can only adjust gamma and contrast so thats all were giving you in the options"
Both suck, its an unsexy problem nobody wants to invest time into fixing, but will have a huge ROI in terms of expierence and potentially a first mover advantage in terms of licensing out a viable pattern to major studios.
But my argument was that in the actual game Portal not many inputs are even needed, which you didn't even respond to...
The one thing that differs in the "analog stick" argument between controller and mouse is that the mouse offers much more flexible movement than the controller. You can only angle the controller at most 30° and that's it, while you can throw your mouse across your desk if you want to. This I could accept does theoretically limit design a little bit if you are aiming for an enjoyable controller experience in a fast-paced game where you're utilising all 3 axes in movement. But Portal is not a fast-paced game so that doesn't really apply...
Apologies if you feel i misrepresented your argument, or hijacked the orivinal thesis.
Perhaps the term that would be better for what im describing is console-centric game and ux design? Its basically the windows8 problem all over again.