[nostromo95]

Well despite anecdotes of workplace drama, they’ve definitely been effective at continuing to manage Steam, which is likely orders of magnitude more lucrative than developing single player videogames. Everyone points to Valve failing to deliver a Half-Life sequel as a failure but it’s more a symptom of changing organizational priorities.

[tikhonj]

Also, when they did deliver a Half Life game, it was incredibly well executed and novel in a way that could simply not happen at a different company with a different culture. Normally I'd dismiss claims like that as puffery, but here it's concrete: no other big studios have invested in a VR game at that scale. And, veering into less quantitative observations, I haven't seen any VR game—and not many "normal" games either—with the level of attention to detail that Alyx got.

I've listened to some of the design commentaries for the game, and I was really impressed at how much time, effort and user testing Valve was willing to put in to every detail. VR is a new medium, and it's impressive to see an organization learn how to take advantage of it so thoroughly. It takes a special culture to make space for people to try things and indulge in perfectionism—takes a lot of money too, of course, but other AAA studios have just as much but don't hew to the same standard.

I know Valve's approach is controversial and I'm sure it's not perfect, but it's clearly doing something right that very few other companies are. I've seen small teams work in ways like that, but never at scale. One of these days I'd love to work at a company trying something like that. (Probably not in video game development though :P.)