Lemmy: Corporations are terrible. None of them have your back. They’re all just out to make money and the only reason they pay their employees is because slavery is illegal.
Gabe Newell has made some of the best games and Steam is the best platform for consumers, sure Epic Games is better for developers but it’s not great to actually use as a consumer.
Look, despite Musk’s PR, I never read a story about Musk like this:
In 2004, Wolpaw was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. Expecting his condition to require a departure from the company, he spoke with managing director Gabe Newell, who surprised him by offering an extended leave with pay. “Your job is to get better,” Newell said. “That is your job description at Valve. So go home to your wife and come back when you are better.”
Gabe Newell isn’t some kind of saint, but he does at least treat his employees like human beings, unlike Musk who famously berates his employees and treats them incredibly badly, especially if they have to (gasp!) miss work for any reason.
So while people shouldn’t be praising Valve as some kind of panacea in the world, because they’re still just a company, the reality is things like this have endeared Newell to the gaming community and made them believe he did care about a quality work environment.
A reminder, 2004 was before Wolpaw had written for multiple hit games from Valve. Portal came out in 2007 with Wolpaw as one half of the writing team. A few years later he would be head writer on Portal 2.
Those games would not have been the same if he had been let go from Valve when he was sick with ulcerative colitis.
Just a different perspective, I think it’s unfair to compare Newell to a fucking slave drive apartheid fuckhead like Musk.
that’s exactly what will happen. Valve is a gaming giant because their services offer a paid experience tenfold better than the free piracy, if said exerience becomes shit, well, no reason to keep hanging around is there?
Valve has been compared to Lord of the Flies because of its corporate structure by multiple people who worked for them. The company has an internal ranking system that determines compensation. It’s also one of the least diverse workplaces in its industry, being overwhelmingly white and male.
So, while I’m glad that Gabe was nice to one of his direct reports, the reality is that the president of the company being nice to one specific person doesn’t make the company good or ethically ran.
“Can’t click heads? Don’t worry about it, because this AWP follows its namesake by finding clickable heads for you. Just aim down the sights and let the HeadTrak tech do the rest.”
Available in limited edition Season 7 Pass Lv.50, Lv.75, and Lv.100 Crates.
Oh shid and cume. Isn’t that sorta what the free loot cards are? The ones you get randomly for doing stuff in games. Iirc you can sell them on their marketplace for money. It isn’t unreasonable for a new dick head CEO to just overhaul that system into a more active gacha system for all their games.
I couldn’t imagine any decent reason valve would get people in charge that would want to go public with it. They have all the capital in house to fund any idiotic thing they may want to try. No reason to risk sharing profits with outside investors.
While nepotism is almost universally a bad thing, Gabe has shown that he does not subscribe to the "profit at any cost" school of business, but instead believes that if you provide a good service people will pay you for it. Hopefully he's been able to pass those values on to his son.
My concern is his son despite having this shit DRILLED INTO HIS HEAD (which I can’t guarantee) will chase a cashout. That’s the one problem with nepos.
The other problem is if he’s qualified for the job. Which feeds into point 1.
Tbf as long as it doesn’t go public it will probably be fine regardless of who takes the job. It doesn’t take a genius to keep up the good work in a company that can afford to plan long time.
I guess you’ve never had a “new boss” come in, huh? Even in a private company?
Man, new bosses love to shake things up, to “make the workplace theirs.” It’s literally one of the most common things to happen when new bosses come, and very often it results in a deep change in company interpersonal politics.
Barry used to be your go-to guy, but the new boss has decided they just don’t like Barry. Why? They couldn’t tell you, but Barry gets under their skin, so it doesn’t matter how he’s the best guy on the team who can handle whatever is thrown at him, his role is going to be dilluted and minimized and he’s going to be pushed and prodded by negative management to try to get him to just quit. Eventually, Barry will just quit because who wants to work under those conditions. Barry found a better job, and now he’s replaced by your new bosses 20-something nephew who doesn’t know what the fuck he is doing at all and everyone can’t stand. He’s a fucking loser who keeps getting promoted by the new boss.
I’ve been through that too many times to pretend it’s just “that easy.” No, generally the kind of people drawn to that role are controlling dickheads who have their own dickhead “vision” of being the biggest dickhead to ever dickhead.
Unless they fuck it up somehow in recruiting a new CEO, Valve really wouldn’t find it hard to ask a new CEO “Here’s our revenue, and our expenses, our profits. How would you keep this in place without crashing our revenue stream and maybe doing new greenfield stuff?”
If their first words are: “Well, I like the idea of charging our customers an install fee…” you know to keep looking.
But how am I supposed to prove my exorbitant salary if I can’t prove I’m doing something. If I don’t change anything they’ll realize I don’t do anything and can’t do anything! As for my next idea, we need to put ads in steam because everybody is doing it. And people should watch a promo video before their game starts because look at how successful YouTube is! I’m a genius for doing this. YOU ALL JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND.
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Have seen it. Good managers walk in and watch their team for months to learn how things work before making changes. Bad managers walk in and change things before learning why they work the way they do. We saw that with Twitter/X.
You are right in that Steam would probably continue on just fine on autopilot. You might not be right by assuming that the sort of person who would seek to and achieve such a position wouldn’t let their own ego dictate every decision–change for change’s sake so that they can point at how wonderful they are at the job.
I would rather hope that he legalizes and codifies the “flat” management structure, disallowing any one figure head from taking over and fucking things up.
Valve annoys people because it can be slow to choose to do something, because everyone works on what they want to work on, but it means average workers have a lot more agency in how they’re involved in the company.
I’m sure there’s till unofficial cliques and leaders, but having it in legalese for the employees post-Gabe would be nice.
The problem with that is that they’re a private company so that can just be undone by the largest share holder, unless that codification also splits up his equity across the employees.
I would argue the flat management makes it hard for Valve to produce things and they should re-evaluate it, but you can do this while also not turning into a rank and yank shit out fortnite clones 420 69 flossing scheme to fuck over users and line their pockets.
I think that’s a valid take, and I think Valve has sort of re-evaluated it, because if I recall correctly, they kind of had to “put on hold” the “do whatever you want” bit to get Half Life: Alyx out of the door. So, imho, it seems like they’re capable of doing both. They managed to produce a high quality VR game by putting the “flat” on the backburner, and them coming back to it later.
Although, to be fair, I hadn’t heard anything similar about the SteamDeck or any Valve hardware, really. So if they can make a SteamDeck from scratch, an entire new product category, with the flat management structure, I bet it’s not holding them back half as much as some folks at GlassDoor seem to think.
Its really hard to get a look inside Valve, because I can’t confirm/deny the Steam Deck came about because of the flat management. I’ll be honest, my apprehension about their management stems from the many failed attempts to conclude the franchise they started in Half-Life and how 20 different projects died to get to Alyx. Would a change in leadership get us more of the same? Maybe. It would probably be a substandard product, and i’m still recovering from Starfield being mid.
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