Seriously, it’s like the Night of the Long Crowbars over there.
Has Steam revenue suddenly dropped? I got the sense that last season everyone who used to buy $100 of Steam games a year suddenly discovered they no longer needed any more games.
What Alan said. I know a lot of Valve folks (a number of people I’ve worked with elsewhere have gone there over the years), and through them I’ve met a fair number of other Valve employees, including a few of the folks on the Develop list of people no longer listed as employees. The “they probably didn’t fit in with Gabe’s development collective utopia” speculation I keep seeing doesn’t seem to fit with how long many of these people have been there. Bay Raitt, for instance, has been there since 2004. I doubt “couldn’t hack the corporate culture” is behind this.
Oh. If they’re letting go 9 year veterans, clearly not.
Is Valve an exception or is there no job security at any of the companies in the gaming industry?
Granted that I have never worked in the industry, I am under the impression that gaming is one of the worst areas of software development to go into concerning job security.
This just keeps getting weirder the more I hear about it.
Tom Leonard is out. He did a lot of work on Half-Life 2, Episodes 1 and 2, and Left 4 Dead.
Someone made a good point on another forum … calling these layoffs isn’t really accurate in the classic sense. Valve isn’t running out of money nor or are they in trouble. It’s more “trimming the fat” than “layoffs”.
Trimming the fat? Sounds more like they’re cutting off an arm. “Hey, what do we need two of these things for?”
I think the obvious explanation is that Valve is somehow changing the focus of their future projects. Not a 180, I assume, but a serious shift in priorities. However, it’s hard to read these particular layoffs and figure out what the new direction is or what old direction is ending. Early reports said hardware, which indicates maybe the Steambox is finished. But a lot of these more recent releases seem to be art and art tech people. I guess it’s more complicated that can be easily assessed form the outside. Knowing Valve, they’ll probably release some kind of statement about it.
Considering the many different things that Valve is working on, one would imagine they’d be growing the company, not scaling back.
Oh wow, Source Filmmaker is one of those cool little projects that only companies like Valve are doing. It doesn’t produce direct revenue but it generates a ton of goodwill towards Valve, and also a million TF2 and Valve memes.
Hope this doesn’t signify a change in direction towards short term profit and away from cool projects like this.
Didn’t Gabe talk about Steam needing to become its own entity away from Valve at that conference? Perhaps this is related to that becoming a reality.
The popular impression seems to be that Valve/Steam prints money, so unless that’s wrong, this comes down to performance or culture/politics.
There’s a lot of reasons, totally speculative, why this could be happening. I’m pretty sure it’s not a corporate culture thing. However, it could be a direction-of-company thing. It’s very possible a senior cadre of Valve employees at some point or another have more-than-casually protested against the direction of the company in one fashion or another. Newell is exercising his newfound ability to fire people. Maybe they gave him an ultimatum.
Perhaps they wanted to work in something outside of Valve and by procedure were then let go in one fell sweep (at various gaming companies if you announce intention to leave for a competitor you’re immediately walked out of the door).
Or maybe they aren’t a group and various folks just wanted to move off in different directions, and the company decided to do let them do it in one fell swoop.
Or maybe they were thieves.
Or maybe it was a cultural thing, but not exactly what we originally thought. Perhaps many of them were of an older culture or way of thinking, and there needed to be some… straightening out going on.
— Alan
Edit: Or as Vesper indicates, they are forming a splinter company that works with Valve regarding Steam or hardware or… something. You’d think this would have been announced previously to employees actually being let go, however, or as some put it, getting fired.
Maybe that box of Krispy Kremes marked “GABE’S DON’T TOUCH” really wasn’t community property.
I have no idea what’s really going on over there, but I can sort of envision a move to refocus on content development instead of infrastructure.
Assuming the lists of people being posted about are reasonably accurate, I don’t see how this logically follows. Many on the list are content development folks. That’s the most confusing bit of the whole thing, there doesn’t seem to be any particularly strong pattern among the people on the list.
