I thought it would be worth highlighting this as a separate aspect from the rest of the article which is covered in this thread: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=745072
There's a lot more about the history of how they set up and how their organization lead them this way at the link, but since I imagined this would be a bit of a polar point, that's why I broke it off to here.
There's a lot more about the history of how they set up and how their organization lead them this way at the link, but since I imagined this would be a bit of a polar point, that's why I broke it off to here.
Washington Post said:So, if somebody becomes the group manager of X, they’re going to really resist it when X is not what you want to do in the next round of games. You don’t want them to sort of burrow into that – you want them to recognize that being really good at Half-Life level design is not as nearly as valued as thinking of how to design social multi-player experiences. You've had them feel like they have an organization and title tied up to something when the key is to just continue to follow where the customers are leading.
Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/01/03/gabe-newell-on-what-makes-valve-tick/Washington Post said:WP: How has this decentralized decision-making process evolved over the the years? How would you compare how it runs now to when you had only 20 employees?
GN: I think there's just more much more of history of it now so people are willing to trust it more and be less worried that it's going to go in some poor direction. I just think that we're more confident now and we've got that experience in lots of things. When we started out we were a single-player video game company that could have been really successful just doing Half-Life sequel after Half-Life sequel, but we collectively said let's try to make multi-player games even though there's never been a commercial successful multi-player game.
Then we tried to do Steam. There were a bunch of people internally who thought Steam was a really bad idea, but what they didn't think was that they would tell the people who were working on Steam what to do with their time. They were like "that's what you want to do wit your time, that's fine, but we're going to spend our time working on Half-Life 2. We think you're kind of wasting your time, but it's your time to waste."
In retrospect, it was a great idea, right? So the key thing was that people bear the consequences of their own choices, so if I spend my time on it the only persons time I'm wasting is mine. Over time, I think people sort of recognize how useful it is for people to vote with their time. There is a huge amount of wisdom in people's decisions about what they personally want to work on next.