14 DAY TRIAL // One of the most interesting documents about the video game industry to become public during last week was not a report from an analysis firm or a leaked blueprint for an upcoming AAA title, but a book that Valve, developer of a number of huge franchises and the creator of Steam, distributes to its employees when they become part of the team.
The book is slender enough to read in one sitting, but it details a very interesting and unconventional structure for a company that is as successful as Valve, generating more revenue per employee than Microsoft or Google, as they claim.
One of the more mind-blowing passages reads: “How does Valve decide what to work on? The same way we make other decisions: by waiting for someone to decide that it’s the right thing to do, and then letting them recruit other people to work on it with them.”
The section, towards the end of the book, then adds, “We believe in each other to make these decisions, and this faith has proven to be well-founded over and over again.”
This is either a stroke of genius for a video game developer and technology company or the blueprint for future failure, and I can’t really decide whether inside Valve the process is actually as simple and unsupervised as the above quotes suggest.
Valve is known for being eccentric among developers and for having an internal rhythm that is very different from other video game companies.
So far their process has managed to spawn Steam, Team Fortress 2, Half-Life and Left 4 Dead, all very successful products that are loved by players, but I wonder how happy fans are knowing that, because of how Valve is structured, the long-awaited Half-Life 3 might not have a development team as long as no one wants to work on it.