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by Draiken 790 days ago
Isn't the fact that they're the market leader in what they do proof enough? Would they have created/found this cash cow if they were a traditional company?

People try to poke holes in their ways, yet they have made legendary games, amazing hardware and absolutely dominate the game distribution market.

Basically all of their competitors use the traditional management style. What other evidence would you expect?
1 comments
incrudible 790 days ago
A sample of one isn't enough, and in any event their success is not reproducible. They had a major title in Half Life 2, convincing people to install Steam, but that was their last major title and it is not clear that they used this process at the time.

Going forward: Someone else created Counter Strike, someone else created DoTA, someone else created Portal, someone else created Team Fortress, someone else create Left 4 Dead. Valve took these projects on and polished them, but they didn't really create something new until Artifact - which failed in the market.

What you also don't see is all the unannounced projects that went nowhere, because that's what you get when people just get to play around on their own, indefinitely.

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wizzwizz4 790 days ago
> someone else created Portal,

A team created Narbacular Drop, and that same team then worked on Portal as part of Valve. It's not "someone else" by any stretch.

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_zamorano_ 790 days ago
What? Aren't those games Valve orginals since the beggining?
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incrudible 790 days ago
In the sense that these games were conceived by teams working at Valve, using this management structure, the answer is: No, none of them are.

Most of them have their origin in community mods, some already having gained substantial traction on their own.

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Draiken 789 days ago
Sure, the original idea might've already been there, but they built the game all the same. Saying it "wasn't them" is misleading. They built it from scratch, with existing concepts from mods.

Maybe their ideas department isn't the greatest, but their execution on these games was very good in the long run. They popularized hats and make absurd amounts of money from it.

Let's not forget the Steam Deck. Early on still, but an excellent product in a whole different area.

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