Developers at Valve "Can't Believe" Players Are Happy Even with Small Updates for the Company's Games
Some Team Fortress 2 fans have been waiting for a major update for many years.
Recently, Valve veteran Chet Faliszek published a new video in which he talked about how the company views the reaction to updates for its games, such as Team Fortress 2 or Counter-Strike.
According to Faliszek, Valve employees are surprised when players are happy even with small updates:
You know, I wanted to address one comment: someone was complaining that updates are often small — for example, for Counter-Strike or even TF2, although sometimes large updates come out. Even at Valve, we would say things like, “I can’t believe we’re getting away with this.” Not in the sense that we were trying to trick you... it’s just that other projects have thousands of people working on them, creating a bunch of different things, and then Valve comes out and says, “Here are five skins.” And people are like, “Cool.”
Faliszek said that inside Valve, employees sometimes think, “we just get lucky.” However, he himself noted that success is not entirely accidental. Relatively small teams work on Valve games, and the fact that the creators are “on the same page” is felt in the games they create:
There were times when I worked there, we would look back and think, “Seriously?” We loved what we were doing. We loved Left 4 Dead, but we didn’t think it would become so popular. It’s crazy. It’s great. And I think part of that success was that everyone was on the same page and working together — and you can see that in the game. But when you have a team of 500 people, that kind of cohesion is lost.
Of course, Faliszek explains, you can create good games in large teams. But if you add more employees to companies like Valve, where there is no formal management structure, it can lead to a bad result: “management structures would arise on the fly and would be 'unhealthy,' and that would not be beneficial either.”
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