Image Credit: Jeffrey Grubb\/GamesBeat<\/em><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\u201cWe\u2019ve talked about this stuff a lot, and we see our customers talking about it,\u201d Johnson said. \u201cThere\u2019s a detail, a bit of nuance in there, that\u2019s usually missing from what customers think about how we work internally. When people are making those decisions, to work on one project or another, they\u2019re conscientious about what customers want as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
Valve employees aren\u2019t making their decisions in a vacuum based solely on what excites them. They take a lot into consideration, and that includes the desires of players.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s the fundamental thing,\u201d said Johnson. \u201cIt\u2019s not this pure selfish: \u2018I feel like working on this on Tuesday but not on Wednesday\u2019 type of thing. They know, when they work on one product or another, the product they\u2019re leaving has a void to fill. They\u2019re moving and making sure our customers are still happy one way or another. It\u2019s not this constant free-flowing thing. They have to consider all factors for all customers.\u201d<\/p>\n
But you might not agree that Valve is taking you into consideration. Maybe you think the company\u2019s customer service stinks, or you\u2019ve been screaming for a year that a Counter-Strike map is broken, or you just want to hear from the company why its servers are down. Chances are, if you\u2019re a dedicated Steam user, you\u2019ve found something that you think is busted, and it\u00a0never seems like the company acknowledges that.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s probably not going to change. During a panel with the developers of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2, and Team Fortress 2, I asked about the view on community management and communication. I brought the subreddit for Counter-Strike: GO, which often has massively popular threads about Valve screwing up and then publicly acknowledging that.<\/p>\n
And while Valve admits that its customer service is garbage \u2014 Johnson called it terrible \u2014 the company is probably not going to suddenly hire community communication specialists.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe think it\u2019s critically important for our products \u2014 for the people that are actually building things to be as close to customers as possible,\u201d Counter-Strike developer Brian Leventhal explained. \u201cWe feel like it\u2019s been successful in a bunch of areas. It has tradeoffs. But generally we want the person who\u2019s going to have to make Dust 2 better have to be the person to defend those decisions to the community. That kind of applies to everything. We don\u2019t think that adding a person in the middle of that process is going to end with \u2014 we would much rather fix the problem and tell them it\u2019s fixed than have somebody say, hey, we\u2019re working on it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Again, this is about the flow of information. Everyone on the Counter-Strike team is responsible for everything about the game, so they can\u2019t pass off the responsibility of checking in on the community to someone else. And, in the end, the company thinks that it\u2019s more important to solve problems than to have someone tell you that they\u2019re solving them.<\/p>\n
But the point is that Valve claims it\u2019s listening, and it often decides to fix something specifically because of a thread on Reddit. Other times, the company make ignore a community outcry because the data shows that the audience actually wants something else, but Valve still argues that this is a form of listening.<\/p>\n
Motivating factors<\/h2>\n I could see it in Newell when he spoke \u2014 all these points of data impacting what his decision about how to spend his time. It\u2019s up to him to listen to you, to look at the user metrics on Steam, and to read the response to reporting like this to figure out what Valve can do and how he can help the company accomplish that.<\/p>\n
Today, that information and Newell\u2019s desires have ended up with him on the VR team.\u00a0He sees a chance to give gamers something beyond mouse-and-keyboard experiences, and he understands how he can contribute to that. But in the past, he has worked on projects that weren\u2019t necessarily about moving Valve or the industry forward. Instead, he focused his energies on building tools and hardware to insulate PC gaming from a potential threat when he thought that Windows 8 could lead Microsoft to close down the traditionally open personal-computing space.\u00a0That led to Valve creating its SteamOS Linux-based operating system and the console-like Steam Machine PCs.<\/p>\n
Neither Valve\u2019s own OS or its PC gaming hardware have really taken off, and no one at Valve seemed that interested in talking about them anymore. And that\u2019s likely because the fear that Microsoft was going to overreach has faded, and so the motivation to get traction with those products has faded.<\/p>\n
\u201cBeing worried that somebody else is going to do something stupid and wreck the gaming community is a little less exciting than doing something more positive,\u201dsaid Newell. \u201cBut it\u2019s true on any project. Everybody knows you can\u2019t eat marshmallows all the time. We\u2019ve all been doing this a long time. Everyone\u2019s pretty sophisticated. You can tell people in your own field, people who understand that to do what you do well requires you to have a lot of maturity and experience in order to make sure you\u2019re doing both the glamorous, fun parts of your job and the not so glamorous, but equally important stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n
But for Valve, VR is glamorous, and the way Newell spoke about it, it\u2019s clear that the company is not going to let it fade. SteamVR will either succeed or implode, but it won\u2019t just quietly fall into the background. And that\u2019s the difference of the motivation. When it\u2019s something the customers are interested in and it\u2019s something Valve employees are excited to work on, then the company will do everything it takes.<\/p>\n
From zero to 100<\/h2>\n The day I went to Valve, I woke up at 4:30 a.m. Mountain time. I got in my car while it was still dark, and I drove to Denver International Airport. By the end of that day, I had caught a plane back home and got back to my car in the airport parking lot by 11 p.m.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Above: Valve boss Gabe Newell.<\/p>\n
Image Credit: Valve<\/em><\/div>\n<\/div>\nIt was odd to go from having a minimum amount of contact with Valve on the drive to the airport that morning to having\u00a0hours worth of conversations with some of the company\u2019s most important people to think about on the drive home. That whiplash in going from zero interaction with Valve to 100 was overwhelming because now that I had access, I was discovering a million new questions I wish I would\u2019ve had them answer.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s also bizarre to have an opinion on Gabe Newell beyond his persona as an internet meme. A handful of hours aren\u2019t enough to get to know anything, but my first impression gave me enough time to at least notice some interesting things about the way he speaks.\u00a0He seems to have all the thoughts in the world swimming around in his head all at the same time. It takes him a sentence or two to get that information sorted out in a way that makes sense. And then he also often uses example quotes to illustrate his ideas. It\u2019s a style that\u2019s very unlike some of the more precise and computational orators in the gaming industry, like John Carmack or Tim Sweeney.<\/p>\n
But I found his speaking style refreshing. Inside his head, he has all of this data, and it\u2019s all bursting to get out at once. And you can\u00a0sense that when he\u2019s speaking.<\/p>\n
My biggest takeaway from visiting Valve, however, is that the company is confident in how it approaches making products for gamers. Everyone was on board with the ideas of a flat corporate structure and having the responsibility to pick what they work on. Valve thinks this is the best way it can serve gamers,\u00a0and it thinks most gamers would agree if they understood that.<\/p>\n
And I think that\u2019s why the company invited me.\u00a0Newell and his team all think they\u2019re doing what\u2019s best for gamers, and they are looking for new ways to communicate that to gamers.<\/p>\n
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