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Comment by gchadwick | Hacker News Reader

> Also, I'm guessing that these structures are only effective in firms like Valve: a small number of experienced employees, no hard deadlines, and lots of specialists who know how to best allocate their time

Are they that effective at Valve though? Seems it's not bad enough to cause the company serious damage but are they doing much nowadays? Yes there's the Vive but that's in partnership with HTC who may be providing a lot of the top-level direction.

I get the feeling Valve is coasting along on the Steam cash cow and could be doing a lot more with the people and resources they have available.

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People forget how hard-fought the battle for Steam really was. Half-Life 2's release on Steam nearly broke them. One word for it could be "coasting", but another might be "reaping" the rewards of choosing to fight that battle long before anyone else believed it was winnable.

And they're not really coasting. They're at the forefront of broadcast gaming, competitive gaming, whatever you want to call it. I've watched Riot grow, and Blizzard falter in that industry, but I'm damn near positive that Valve has the better framework for the long-term.

Edit: I also think that Valve's primary product is "not having to deal with industry standard financing and deadline problems so we can make games that are actually good without burning out like everyone else does."

They are maintaining three of the largest free to play games in the world. Revenues from those three games is said to rival that of Steam itself.

An example of a flat structure failure is the complete lack of a new episode of Half Life.

I think not doing HL3 was the right move from the business standpoint. The expectations of the HL fans got so high that anything short of another milestone of PC gaming history would damage them. It is hard to beat yourself, when the last success was so big. Much smarter to put the effort into several other directions.

Doing half life 2, then switching to episodic content so you can get things moving faster, then taking forever to release 2 episodes, then sitting around for a decade with an unresolved cliffhanger is ridiculous.

I don't buy your reasoning either. Right business move because DotA 2 and their Hats! are a cash cow business, sure.

They're waiting for VR. Half-Life 2 already spans everything cool you could conceivably do with a 'post-quake 2' shooter. Team Fotress 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Dota 2 cover all the neat online matchmaking, micro-transaction, user-created content stuff.

They don't want to make Half-Life 3, the expansion to Half-Life 2. They want to make something new. They created something new with Portal, which required them to hone their ability to introduce players to an entirely new game mechanic, but now they have to wait for VR to put it all together.

As a fan of the HL series, I don't need a revolution, I just want to finish the darn story.

We can all appreciate Vulkan

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