I would rather see a company be smaller and do things properly and efficiently then being some massive bloated shithole that lays off thousands every few years while simultaneously making their products crappier and crappier and crappier.
What allways confused me as a kid was when I watched the news and just kept seeing news about mass lay-offs, yet never hearing about mass hirings…
Agreed but Valve seems to be so lean that it’s just understaffed. It’s easy to have little staff when most of your products can keep running with next to no maintenance and you’re just there to administrate over a monopoly.
They operate wildly different from most other companies. While they have a few tasks assigned to them, they can also just start, move to, or end projects at will. The games they have made were basically made just for fun because enough staff wanted to do them. The reason there hasn’t been a new Half Life entry since Alyx is because only like 2 guys want to do something with it, and that’s not enough.
There’s been a ton of interviews and tour details of their offices (both their current and previous ones) that always made it sound like a pretty dope place to work. But they also have claimed they don’t hire people that haven’t done something. They don’t care if you’ve gone to school and got a degree; you’re more valuable if you have something tangible to show that you’ve actually got some talent.
They wouldn’t operate this way if they didn’t have Steam. These days it’s just a bunch of people taking care of a money printing machine. They get bored and try other stuff sometimes. The problem is that this other stuff won’t make anywhere near what Steam does. The only real work at Valve these days is ensuring they have plan B for when Windows becomes less viable as a platform for them.