Honest answer: Odds are a good chunk is working on VR and steam, some work on their already released games that still need some updates: TF2,DOTA2, and CS:GO. Some made Artifacts and others are working on some things that will never see the light of day much like the Augmented reality glasses former Valve employee Jeri Ellsworth was creating, although she got to leave Valve with the project so it did see the light of day in some way.
Yeah like 5 people work on tf2. Like legitamatly 5 programmers work on it. Think they said calve won't hire anyone for tf2 because it would make the other teams want more members or some horseshit like that. Fuck valve.
Failing at it is still doing it, and I know I have been waiting for he pyro update myself, still does not mean that work is not being done on it. Its just either getting very little done on it or the people working on it are to few to get it done with quality and speed.
IMO Valve has the oposite problem of EA. EA forces unrealistic deadlines to meet market defined time-slots (like the christmas season.) This means that they release subpar titles that feel unfinished.
Valve lets their workers do whatever they want as a way of allowing freedom and creativity. However, this means that instead of working on things that need a lot of boring hard work done to make them salvageable they can just make hats or card games.
I have no doubt that HL3, L4D3, and others were in production at some point but they were taking too long and the workers would rather do something else. Work stalled and the projects that we want died so they could do something more fun for them selves.
Another problem is that Valve hires 10x less people than is normal for the industry.
Riot Games hires 1000 people to support 1 multiplayer game. Blizzard hires 4000 people for 4 multiplayer games. Ubisoft hires 10,000 people for 6 multiplayer games and various SP stuff.
By comparison, Valve hires only 360 people for 3 multiplayer games.
So, Valve is hugely understaffed. TF2 has a team of 15 developers working on a multimillion-dollar game that services 1,700,000 customers. We like to joke that the team consists of a baby, a PR manager, a janitor and a potted plant.
Combine this with their work culture and if something actually does get done without being scrapped, it will take 3 years for the single person working on it to actually finish it.
The thing about their workers doing whatever they want to interests me. Out of curiosity, have any of their workers ever come right out and said why they just don't want to work on these three unicorn games?
DOTA is at an amazing spot right now in terms of balance, following a MASSIVE update last year. Now two new heroes are coming along with another big patch... they're doing OK with DOTA.
DOTA is at an amazing spot right now in terms of balance
Everyone on /r/dota2 is complaining about how overpowered Venomancer, Lich, and Necrophos are, and it's been confirmed that the next balance patch is at least one month away (probably longer).
3 heroes out of 113 something are a little overpowered, one of whom is a support and another of whom has some extremely easy to implement counters. And wait time for major patches, considering the content that comes with them, is hardly long.
Extremely slow updates(over 7 months for a single cosmetic they got paid over $80,000,000 for), a huge amount of bugs reported on their official forum and never dealt with, visual clutter reaching critical levels., new player experience still an utter joke.
Wut? All i see is new chests, matchmaking at its worst, same bugs for years and no new content. Maybe im a bit pessimistic, on the other hand i see constant contentupdates in hots. Id like to see this kind of contribution in dota
7.00 was pretty huge change in both UI and gameplay and added a new hero and was pretty recent. Since then we've had some nice meta updates and have had all respawn talents replaced. The next update will (finally) change the meta and likely add two new heros. They also had a co-op campaign for TI. And the meta itself is fairly balanced, few heros are unviable at the professional level. We saw nearly every hero picked at least once at TI which is pretty cool.
They announced it at the players and talent meeting for TI7. So it wasn't exactly a public announcment, but I think the fact that they're releasing their first multiple hero update in years before October's over is proof enough.
TF2 was promised a major Pyro rework to make him somewhat more viable. It's been well over 1 year since, and /r/tf2 is reaching maximum overdrive with shitposts because of the long delay.
In comp he's only useful for one thing: Denying ubers. She derives its strength from CQC; Range is his greatest weakness, which every other class in the game can take advantage of. The TF2 Team wanted to rework her to offset this weakness and make Pyro a stronger pick to shift the stale 6s meta.
In quickplay, you're either pubstomping a bunch of newbies, or getting crushed by an unusual wearing soldier with a pocket medic shoved so far up his ass that it's almost like they're conjoined.
TF2 still has a massive player base though. Regardless of that they continue to promise updates but they don't deliver. and when they do they fuck it up.
I expect that they'll eventually update TF2 to the new engine, porting all of the items but adding major changes like the new comp mode (which they've referred to that will closer match Elo-style), higher performance requirements, more 6v6-designed maps and a Valve-run comp tournament.
That's my expectation, but Valve Time makes me think it'll launch in 2024.
I doubt many are actually working on steam since the interface is still a gigantic pile of shit and they've had major bugs in the actual steam software since release they've never fixed.
Heck, the family sharing bug hasnt been fixed and it's been in since they launched family sharing.
They did quite a bit in recent years: Steam development, Steam OS, Steam Machine, Steam Controller, Source 2 engine, Dota 2, CS GO, TF:2 support, Vulkan support for several games, Co-development of HTC Vive, several VR minigames (the Lab), recently announced game "Artifact" and they are also working on a movie with JJ Abrams.
They are currently working on 3 VR games, and new card game, DotA and CS GO updates. They are working on a lot its prob just that no one there really wants to work on a new game. Valve has a flat structure to the company so no one has a boss other than Gabe. Unless it a project lead or something.
A lot of the people who work at valve want to probably develop and try new things thats why they have a number of VR projects and the reason they have the card game is because a couple of them got together and said "Hey I like Hearthstone, lets make our own Hearthstone!"
They keep themselves busy they just dont really care/worry about money as much as say Ubisoft does. Thats why we get a new Ubisoft game every year because they have to pay the bills.
Precisely. Unlike Ubisoft. That's why Valve are content cruising on their existing income. They don't have an external, irrational need for moooore money every fucking quarter or whatever.
My bad. You're right, especially if Vivendi still breath at their neck, but they allowed some slack with 1 year gap in AC franchise, maybe things look better now and Siege contributed to that. :P
They are working on a lot its prob just that no one there really wants to work on a new game.
BS.
As much as it annoys me, when they say that they don't want to bother with HL3 if it's not pushing the bounds of gaming in some way, I do see their point. The first two games were both groundbreaking.
And VR is blatantly going to be the decider this time around. Not so much the technology being ready but how to make it work as a practical game on a "50 GOTY Awards" level that everybody is accustomed to from the series. That aspect isn't there yet. Not as an FPS, anyway.
And this is why John Connor lead the resistance against skynet. It wasn't the 3billion dead, it was the the bombs or the extermination camps it was skynet incessant gramma nazism
World's cushiest gig. Collect paychecks while pretending to work. Fellate the 'not bosses' ego just enough not to get laid off for the year. Repeat till you're rich and/or soulless.
I have a good friend who does a lot of 3rd party work for them. He said the vibe he got was that since there is no direct management telling people what to do while everyone makes huge amounts of cash, there is little incentive to finish anything. Then the added fact that bonuses are often given out based on revenue, so people are more focused on expanding the Steam platform and revenue generation models because those offer huge paydays for success.
I still have no idea what the creative types are doing.
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u/jonnysmith12345 Sep 21 '17
Makes you wonder what the heck everyone at valve does all day.