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Jay Pinkerton (Portal 2 and Team Fortress 2 writer) has left Valve.

I'm a primarily PC gamer with an 11 year old Steam account and I'm not a fan of modern valve. CSGO is riddled with cheaters and smurfs, and Dota is just not my cup of tea (I think it's a fine game actually).

As a PC gamer, then, you surely recognize that Valve has done far more in the space than simply manage Counterstrike and DotA, right? Valve has done and continues to do more for Linux gaming in a couple years years than everyone else combined in the whole history of the OS. Steam has a vast feature set that even GOG, which I'm in huge favor of philosophically, isn't close to matching. Develop the only gamepad that doesn't completely blow with PC-oriented games. Do more to advance VR than any other industry player. Etc.
 

Bluth54

Member
Of the "three huge multiplayer games" that valve watches over, it's clear they only care about one which is Dota while CSGO gets jack shit for pretty much a full year (only recently getting a pretty good update) and TF2 is actually gathering dust in a basement (wanna know how I know Valve devs for tf2 at least don't play the game? They released that matchmaking system)

The TF2 team actually passionate about the game. Youtuber Uncle Dane and others who visited Valve have talked about it in his Valve visit video. There's only around 16 people working on TF2 and only 4-6 of them are programmers. Valve doesn't hire people for specific games (and the Valve hiring process is pretty hard to get through). They also admitted to Uncle Dane that they shipped matchmaking too soon.

CSGO doesn't have that many more developers, in the Gabe Newell AMA he said about 20-30 people work on that game. I suspect DOTA2 has the most developers of any of their 3 multiplayers.
 
As a PC gamer, then, you surely recognize that Valve has done far more in the space than simply manage Counterstrike and DotA, right? Valve has done and continues to do more for Linux gaming in a couple years years than everyone else combined in the whole history of the OS. Steam has a vast feature set that even GOG, which I'm in huge favor of philosophically, isn't close to matching. Develop the only gamepad that doesn't completely blow with PC-oriented games. Do more to advance VR than any other industry player. Etc.

Yeah, but the problem is that people that design games do not work on any of those features.

They're nice even if I don't care about Linux integration, and their SteamOS and Steam Machines seem to be dead in the water, but Valve as a game developer is not in a good spot.
 

Ionic

Member
Tell me how I'm wrong on the Vive and room scale VR being expensive as hell

The quote was "you literally need a new room in your house". It's like going to a toy store and being amazed that people are buying Twister when you need a dedicated Twister room to even play it. If you don't have enough open space for room-scale, push your coffee table back when you want to play. If your place of living is small enough that there are no possible 6x6 foot spaces then that's a bummer, but it doesn't mean the technology shouldn't exist or something.

Edit: Vive is totally an expensive piece of hardware though!

And you've also got to remember that Half Life 1 and 2 and portal stand as amazing singleplayer experiences that characterised and made valve regardless of the multiplayer parts of those games

Indeed, but don't act like they haven't been characterized just as much (and arguably much more so) by their multiplayer games. And once again, the quote was very specifically about "singleplayer only" games, which was the point of my response.
 

Bluth54

Member
So all these people have left recently.
Do we know if anyone has joined to replace them?

Valvetime.net has a list of people who have recently left and joined Valve.

Some noticeable recent hires include some of the Kerbal Space Program developers, several former Valve employees that came back to the company, as well as people who worked at Nintendo, Microsoft, Amazon, AMD, Irrational Games, Blizzard, Hanger 13 and at least one artist who made items for DOTA2. Valve is hiring new employees all the time.
 

Bluth54

Member
I didn't realize TF2 had a story, let alone story that needed several full time writers...

TF2 has a huge amount of lore that's only hinted at in game, written by the same writers who worked on Portal. There are SFM videos (there will also be a new 4-5 minute video for the upcoming Pyro/Jungle themed update that's likely coming out later this month or next month), a ton of comics (including a 7 part comic that's just about TF2 lore/story and not related to any TF2 update) and lore in the update pages itself (for example Abraham Lincoln has a notable part of the TF2 lore)

TF2 also gets typically gets 2-3 updates a year that have new voicelines for the characters.
 

Nzyme32

Member
Valvetime.net has a list of people who have recently left and joined Valve.

Some noticeable recent hires include some of the Kerbal Space Program developers, several former Valve employees that came back to the company, as well as people who worked at Nintendo, Microsoft, Amazon, AMD, Irrational Games, Blizzard, Hanger 13 and at least one artist who made items for DOTA2. Valve is hiring new employees all the time.

Their influx is a net intake, yet it's mostly the old guard that have moved out, several of whom are retiring or leaving the games industry. Others forming their own companies too.

Somehow missed that Ken Birdwell retired. Dude was awesome. Got to meet him quite a while ago. Dude was so ridiculously enthusiastic about his work and Valve's
 
Loved the writing in that game—hilarious stuff.

Did he write the dialogue for the Portal 2 reveal trailer? Because that was hype

"I tested you. You tested me."
 
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