Comment by ChrisNorstrom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChrisNorstrom | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

It's all starting to make a bit more sense.

Democracy tends to weed out bad ideas but moves at a snails pace. Tyranny is the opposite. It moves at blazing speed but the mistakes are massive. This explains so much about Valve. It's products are high quality but it's a slow company. They're release games very slowly for a company with their money, their source engine is inferior to modern ones, and (not that it matters to me but for some it does) their graphics aren't exact top notch. I think that's why Half Life Episode 3 is delayed for so long, they're working on a new engine to compete with EA's Frostbite 3.

Before EA came out with Origin and Valve starting hauling ass to add features to Steam, Valve didn't look like it was really pushing any new steam features. There was the redesign and that was all. Then as Steam had more competition they starting added Screenshots manager, greenlight, software, source filmmaker, community hub, walkthroughs, big picture mode, linux support, etc...

It feels like the company is trying to stay small and stay the same despite desperately needing to be restructured in order to keep up with competition.

Maybe "staying a startup forever" doesn't work as good as we thought.

Valve is really not a slow company. I've heard this expressed before and never really seen it. Please see this list of IP developed by valve:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation#Games

That's not an insubstantial amount of games for one company.

This doesn't even take into consideration that they currently run the biggest online games store in the world which is a huge undertaking, and all the moonshot developments they have running that might not even see the light of day.

Valve are not a slow company. They're a savvy company. It's hardly surprising that they don't really have a flat power-structure, but they do seem to have some kind of structure that allows them to continue to innovate in a variety of areas.

The only significant game they did since 2007 is Portal 2. (1 game in 6 years). Left for Dead was acquired and the sequel was done basically by the same team.

Valve has Steam and, with it, a very nice income stream (they're basically rich). While they do try stuff with F2P (dota, tf) personally i doubt Valve is a top tier game maker anymore. It seems to me they don't have the ambition anymore and live the good life while Steam provides.

Dota 2 is the #5 PC game being played right now according to Xfire and is only growing. It's pretty unreasonable to call it insignificant.

IIR, DOTA was a mod for Warcraft III, and Valve hired the mod team on to build the sequel based on Source.

from WP "According to Valve's founder and managing director, Gabe Newell, the company's investment in Dota was sparked from the collective interest of several veteran employees, including Team Fortress designer Robin Walker, programmer Adrian Finol and project manager Erik Johnson, all of whom had attempted to partake in team play at a competitive level."

So it might be a popular game, but it's not a major development for Valve in the sense that Team Fortress, Portal 2 or HF2 was...and also demonstrates some of the internal culture issues Valve has.

Popular = profitable. This equation governs the gaming industry.

In the case of Dota 2, the game is bringing in millions via the in-game store. The game has 200k active players at any given time, and they're well on the way to 1mil active players in a few years. A significant portion of those players are buying tournament tickets. Most of them are buying custom equipment like couriers, announcer packs, etc.

Dota 2 will be the most lucrative Valve project since Steam. To call it insignificant is to be short-sighted.

If you still think the MOBA genre is insignificant, then perhaps this infographic will offer some perspective: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2012/10/12/league...

Source: I worked in the MOBA genre.

Team Fortress was a mod for Quake, and Valve hired the mod team to build the sequel based on Source. That doesn't make it less of a major development.

Wasn't it a mod for half life 1 (team fortress classic)?

Heh. What do you think "classic" means when it's part of the title of a product? It means that it's a derivative of something else, and wants to capture some reflected glory. Don't go thinking that "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein", the 1994 movie, is the original.

Team Fortress was a mod for Quake before HL1 was a twinkle in Gaben's eye. TFC was someone saying "that sure was a fun gameplay mode, but I can't get anyone to load Q1 any more... maybe I'll recreate the same thing over again"

Team Fortress Classic is based on Team Fortress which was a Quake mod. In 1999, Valve hired the Team Fortress Quake modders to port their game to the GoldSrc (HL1) engine.

but it's not a major development

What do you consider a major development? Sure they hired the team behind the original but they still developed the game and put it out with company resources.

It was a huge undertaking, that games complexity and features is much more advanced then TF2. This isn't something a few guys did on the side.

I think the lesson here is that people should stop just thinking of Valve as just a games company. And as has been noted below, dota is an insane money maker. Add to that, tf2 is now self funded through people making virtual hats. This isn't the signs of a company sitting on its laurels.

Can Valve make the next episode of Half Life as well as Naughty Dog might? Probably not. I can understand where you're coming from, but still think that if you look at the pile of games they've made, add in steam, the f2p systems they're developing and moonshots like the steambox etc, you find a company both involved and agile, not slow and monolithic. But that's just, like, my opinion!

Uh, the Source engine is very well acclaimed. Valve may not market it like Epic or Crytek, but it has stood up well to time and has received numerous updates.

The guys at Respawn, with Titanfall, seem to be doing just fine with such "old" tech.

> Democracy tends to weed out bad ideas but moves at a snails pace.

That is only true at very large social scales, where getting consensus on anything gets progressively harder. In smaller social scales, ideas can spread like wildfire if the social tapestry is dry enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com