So under those conditions how can you not consider Portal to be an inhouse game? It's an original IP created at Valve, by Valve employees.
-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
‘Valve Time’ allow Valve employees to have healthy work life balance
- Thread starter Arthands
- Start date
I said it was odd talking about "deadline development" in the context of developing an inhouse game. Granted, I'm only familiar with the context of Dota 2 but development time/effort was spent in porting over the game from its original WC3 custom game incarnation. Yes development effort was made and I'm sure a deadline of sorts was as well, but I wouldn't consider it a "ground-up" workflow compared to generating an IP or making a derivative of a pre-existing IP.
Was it? Huh, must've believed something else for all these years then. Derp on my part.
Great. I have no problem with longer dev times or delays if it means developers work saner hours and are treated better.
It was disappointing seeing people defend Rockstar's shitty practices last year, so tweets like these are a breath of fresh air.
It was disappointing seeing people defend Rockstar's shitty practices last year, so tweets like these are a breath of fresh air.
https://www.digipen.edu/showcase/student-games/narbacular-drop
This is the student project that Valve liked enough to hire the small team. Portal itself, from the very first game, was developed only after they were employed in Valve, as a Valve project. Everything from the lore, the narrative, the script, the level design, the puzzles, the assets, etc were original and parts of it tie into Half-Life's universe. It is absolutely an inhouse Valve franchise by any definition!
All types of people, with all types of goals and aspirations exist.
True, and as I wrote, that's cool. I've got no beef with Valve or devs having a healthy life/work balance -- it's just that Valve Time, i.e. basically releasing a game whenever you feel like it, isn't really applicable to most devs out there who constantly have to hit milestones / meet deadlines / keep the lights on. The luxury of Valve Time is an exception, in any industry, and thus barely an example others can learn from or even copy. That obviously doesn't mean other devs should have to crunch.
That's kind of the opposite of what is said in those tweet thought. It state valve time ( ie : how people complain about Valve taking their time releasing things ) as the reason employee have that healthy work/life balance; or vice versa.
Not sure it's even true thought, "valve time" seems more about how anyone can choose to work on whatever they want and switch priority at any time, than about their time spent at work. Take the storefront rework, we expect it's release since 2017, it's unlikely that a 2 year delay is simply the result of not doing extra time every day.
Given what we know they might just work on it... just because they want to ( and well a game can have a second life give enough work & luck i guess). Just like you a very few people working on their still very successfull games ( dota 2, TF2 )... because they apparently don't feel like working on it.
Last edited:
I won't deny they've changed the game pretty substantially since it first came out, they've made great balance changes over the past few years and the game is in a good state. And you are right, at the end of the day valve has put a good amount of work in to the game (for the # of employees working on it). I was just trying to make the point that their support of the game pales in comparison to other esports titles such as overwatch, dota 2, LoL, etc.
Valve's minimum resources approach works when you've got two of the best multiplayer formulas ever (CS and Dota), but there's so much competition in every genre these days. I'll be curious to see what happens when they try to branch out from those - maybe Artifacts complete failure is an outlier or maybe its a sign of things to come.
Yeah, it's great and I'm happy for them.
Always good to remember that my frustration with them when it comes to PR and development is completely separate from them having a healthy work environment.
Always good to remember that my frustration with them when it comes to PR and development is completely separate from them having a healthy work environment.
You are wishing for employees to work themselves to having not a social and family life, so that you can get a game you like from them?
Wow.
And while you dont get a storefront rework in the last year you literally got a SteamLink App for Android, the Chat rehaul, a Game, Proton, new opportunities for internet cafès, constant updates for their decade old MP games, Publisher pages, changes of curator stuff (analytics added) etc.
It's really not a separate conversation.
In fact, I think it's a conversation all Capitalist countries should be having, like yesterday...
I know that you are joking but when i worked in a medium size company with flat structure we were responsibles for cleaning up everything except the toilets.
I have to tell you only one thing, we had the cleanest workspace in any company i know and because it was a team effort it boosted morale. It was like children play, not work.
As for Valve, i congratulate them from the bootm of my heart and happily i want to pay more for games on Steam if workforce here can be happy and live as humans.
Then surely you would also realize that Valve also wrote all the Dota 2 lore from scratch considering that the original mod had literal anime and Final Fantasy characters in it.
It definitely was initially. There was a period of about two years or so when Dota 2 and the original DotA mod both got the exact same balance same balance patches before the sequel started diverging.
exactly i mean ok artifact but other than that they have so many devs and in the last decade only made a card game? come on!
Videogames made by valve in the last decade:
Left 4 Dead 2
Alien Swarm
Portal 2
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
Dota 2
The Lab
Artifact
In the Valley of Gods
let me correct you:
in most of those games werent made in the last 5 years:
The Lab and Artifact, wow one VR demo and one awful card game. great job!
also in the valley of gods wasnt released yet and nobody knows when and its developed from other devs that valve bought
Decade
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to navigationJump to search
For other uses, see Decade (disambiguation).
A decade is a period of 10 years. The word is derived (via French and Latin) from the Ancient Greek: δεκάς, translit. dekas), which means a group of ten. Other words for spans of years also come from Latin: biennium (2 years), triennium (3 years), quadrennium (4 years), lustrum (5 years), century (100 years), millennium (1000 years).
Contents
Usage[edit]
Although any period of ten years is a decade,[1][2] a convenient and frequently referenced interval is based on the tens digit of a calendar year, as in using "1960s" to represent the decade from 1960 to 1969.[3][4] Often, for brevity, only the tens part is mentioned (60s or sixties), although this may leave it uncertain which century is meant. These references are frequently used to encapsulate popular culture or other widespread phenomena that dominated such a decade.
However, the Gregorian calendar begins with the year 1. (There is no year "zero", and the year before AD 1 is 1 BC with nothing in between.) Therefore, its first decade is from AD 1 to AD 10, the second decade from AD 11 to AD 20, and so on.[5] So, although "the 1960s" comprises the years 1960 to 1969, the years 1961-through-1970 comprise "the 197th decade" of the calendar, which can also be referenced as "the seventh decade of the 20th-century".
A decade may also refer to an arbitrary span of ten years. For example, the statement "during his last decade, Mozart explored chromatic harmony to a degree rare at the time", merely refers to the last ten years of Mozart's life without regard to which calendar years are encompassed.
Particularly for the 20th century, a nominal decade is often used to refer not just to a set of ten years but rather to a period roughly approximating those ten years - for example, the phrase the sixties often refers to events that took place between c. 1964 and 1972, and to memories of the counterculture, flower power, protests of 1968 and other things happening at the time. Often, such a nominal decade will come to be known by a title, such as the "Swinging Sixties" (1960s), the "Warring Forties" (1940s) and the "Roaring Twenties" (1920s). This practice is occasionally also applied to decades of earlier centuries, for example, references to the 1890s as the "Gay Nineties" or "Naughty Nineties".
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ "Oxford Dictionaries". askoxford.com. Retrieved 19 January 2015.
- ^ Webster dictionary definition of "decade"
- ^ The OWL at Purdue: Apostrophe
- ^ "1960s". Memidex/Wordnet Dictionary/Thesaurus. Retrieved 2011-08-18.
- ^ Passim, i.a. Spencer, Donald D. 1989. Invitation to number theory with Pascal. Ormond Beach: Camelot. 46: "The first decade is from one to ten inclusive, the second decade from eleven to twenty inclusive, and so on."
Look up decade in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. Wikimedia Commons has media related to Decades.
- Definition from Etymology Online
Last year? And 2016? And now they have another game coming in 2019? Plus three more unnanounced games in full production?
It helps a lot. They are not forced to grow every year. They can even decide to earn less money than they could (blasphemy!!!) if they think it's the right thing for their business. I can't know if they actually did it, but they could.
That's good to hear that she has a good life balance working there.
Although I have still my doubts that Valve's workplace really has changed for good after reading all the tweets from Rich Geldreich last year.
Although I have still my doubts that Valve's workplace really has changed for good after reading all the tweets from Rich Geldreich last year.
It's true for any company, game developers or otherwise. Nothing in those tweets is specific to game developers. All companies should be working towards giving their employees a better work/life balance.
All companies have deadlines and dates they need to hit.
Is Valve the gaming equivalent of pretending you know something about sports at a party by spouting incorrect but widely used statements?
Every single thread it's the same stuff, like it all came from a knock off Trivial Pursuit card.
They haven't made a game in X years.
All they make is hats.
Greedy.
Steam never updated.
Monopoly.
And many more bullshit claims.
Every single thread it's the same stuff, like it all came from a knock off Trivial Pursuit card.
They haven't made a game in X years.
All they make is hats.
Greedy.
Steam never updated.
Monopoly.
And many more bullshit claims.
This is one of these things where I wonder about the open company structure. Working on artifact can not be much fun right now, so what happens if most devs say they want to work on another project?
How the fuck are you going to "correct" someone by blatantly moving goal posts.
I've worked in toxic environments that breed a masochistic level of competition between employees when it comes to how many hours they've worked, with the first one out the door before 10pm getting sidelong looks.
I haven't been at Valve for long but I echo Jane's sentiment here. I find it an extremely pleasant place to work. People certainly put in extra hours when needed, or if they feel like it, but the self-directed nature of the work means those extra hours are usually spent on things that people feel personally invested in. If I see I can add value to a product, and I feel the work will be enjoyable, I don't mind coming in at the weekend to bash it out. I have never felt an implicit expectation to crunch.
Caveat: I can't speak for anyone else at the company, just my own, brief experience.
I haven't been at Valve for long but I echo Jane's sentiment here. I find it an extremely pleasant place to work. People certainly put in extra hours when needed, or if they feel like it, but the self-directed nature of the work means those extra hours are usually spent on things that people feel personally invested in. If I see I can add value to a product, and I feel the work will be enjoyable, I don't mind coming in at the weekend to bash it out. I have never felt an implicit expectation to crunch.
Caveat: I can't speak for anyone else at the company, just my own, brief experience.
Didn't Valve have issues with their work culture because since no one was a clear boss, people tended started to create "high school cliques" where if you weren't in line with them, they would make your work very hard? or it was just a rumor?
Artifact is generally considered to be a good card game. Peoples issues come from the payment model, the actual gameplay is pretty good.
The big irony here is that Valve couldn't afford Valve time if they weren't profiting from selling all those games produced by people doing crazy overtimes and constant crunch.
In short, this tweet is about as miopic as one from a fashion store clerk who works 9-17 selling clothes made from people who are fundamentally slaves.
In short, this tweet is about as miopic as one from a fashion store clerk who works 9-17 selling clothes made from people who are fundamentally slaves.
That's great to hear. I am a firm believer in the fact that people are at their most productive when they are happy and rested. Mandatory sustained crunch times need to end.
Valve isnt forcing other pubs and devs to crunch.
"Damn Valve and their.... good work-life balance!"
Ubisoft is probably the most efficient company in the industry and is well renowned for its work/life balance. Gigantic games like AC Odyssey were made without crunch.
So no, I'm not convinced that working at glacial pace on unambitious projects is something to applaud them for.
So no, I'm not convinced that working at glacial pace on unambitious projects is something to applaud them for.
