A Small Revolution

Valve is unlike any other game company you might have encountered. There are no managers. If a developer gets bored, he gets a new project. It sounds like chaos, but company boss Gabe Newell insists it's the only way to ensure that his staff remain focused, inventive and open to new ideas and approaches.

Speaking to Eurogamer's Tom Bramwell in the second part of our exclusive interview, Newell expands on the thinking behind the company's structure, discusses the potential to move into areas besides games, explains why the developer went with Electronic Arts for distribution, and sermonises on the importance of listening to your customers.

Part one of this interview can be read here.

Gabe Newell: I worked in a bunch of different kinds of organisations, and I think they're better suited for different kinds of problems. Very hierarchical, very command-and-control organisations work really well for doing the same thing over and over and over, where removing defects is your main goal. It's like if you're making cars or you're doing product support, repeatability and defect-detection are critical aspects and you need to build an organisation that works well, but I think that the challenges that we have right now in the games industry, specifically and more broadly in the entertainment industry are about inventing new things, about seeing things that occur between disciplines.

So a lot of time the people who are most successful doing that here at Valve are people who are engineers who have fine arts background, and our goal is not to make them increasingly narrow and increasingly specialised but instead push them to be broader in their perspective and see the opportunities for what hasn't been done rather than to do what's been done in the past more cheaply or with greater quality. So the organisation that supports that is one that minimises the boundaries between, not emphasises the restrictions and values specialisation, so that's why we don't want people thinking of themselves as increasingly specialised and narrow in their focus; we want people to say, 'You know what, I was thinking about this problem and it's not really an engineering problem, it's really this kind of problem; it's a production problem, it's a tools problem, it's an art problem, and here I can show you because I think broadly enough.' So to that extent titles are not particularly helpful to us in terms of getting people to be more successful.

The thing we talk about most publicly in terms of how we do things is the cabal approach - the collaborative, iterative approach. We work very, very hard to keep people here because so much of what's necessary when you're doing this is experience with the other people around you. Like, we [gestures to Doug Lombardi] have been working together for ten years and it really helps that we have that shared history to draw on when we feel like... It's much easier for us to take risks, like, 'Oh, let's do this Orange Box thing,' which... We had enough of a history to say these are the positives, these are the negatives, and have confidence in each other's judgement and know where each other's coming from. So it would be much harder to do that if we didn't have that shared history.

That's true for lots of things. I've been working with everybody here for a long time, and we get better. It's one of those things that when you ship a product you learn a bunch of stuff about how to do that better, and it would be a tragedy to lose that. So that's another thing that contributes to our ability to do this is just the longevity of our shared experience. People change roles a lot inside of the company.

I think that we're really trying to let our customers tell us what they like and what they don't like, and we seem to get a really good response. One of the things we released recently was the movie for the Heavy Weapons Guy [one of the character classes in Team Fortress 2], so the feedback we get from that, we go in and read forum posts, we get email telling us what they like and what they don't like, and then we say we should probably do more of those, right, people like those.

It's not a chunk of gameplay, and we don't make any money from it, but maybe that's something where we could wrap some advertising around it and put that out on Steam and do a lot of those rather than just doing a bunch of one-offs. So right now we do a minute-and-a-half narrative piece, our output is fundamentally interactive property and people like them, so that's a signal that maybe we should do more of those, and so we'll just watch that and at some point people might say, 'You know what, I wish I'd had an extra map rather than the thing that you did.' It's the same way we did with commentary. We trialled it with [Half-Life 2 add-on] Lost Coast and because of the feedback we got, we've put it an order of magnitude more into Episode One, and in Episode Two there's a huge increase yet again.

The thing is, there are many forum posts, and we go through and if something gets posted on YouTube we read what everybody says there, and I read every piece of email. I don't respond to every piece of email I get because I can't but I do read every piece of email I get, and try to synthesise that into the clear sense of how we can do a better job with our products. We pay attention. It's hugely valuable to us how articulate and thoughtful the community is, because any game developer is going to benefit enormously from paying attention to what people have to say. It's like with the press. You read the reviews and you pay attention and it's going to help you understand what you're doing right and what you need to work harder at. So we continue to benefit from that.

It's pretty straightforward. We went around and talked to all the people we could use and for some of the markets that we're in EA is a great partner for that and for other areas we work with other people, but we've been really happy with EA; they've done a great job for us. Sometimes EA gets painted a little bit as the boogeyman... We keep waiting for them to jump round the corner! And it hasn't happened. We've been really happy with everyone there and the job they've done for us.

Yep. I think that part of why... I think something that contributes to our ability to be successful is that we don't have external financing on our projects; we don't have... There's no venture capitalists breathing down our neck, and I think that helps us make decisions that are more focused on what customers will like than what a third party has an opinion about.

I've started getting to know people in the film business, for example, and it's shocking how much interference there is in what should be really straightforward product development decisions. People suddenly have an opinion and have really terrible opinions that break the development process, so, as frustrating as it can be in the games industry, in the feature films business there are whole other levels of people having opinions. I was talking to somebody about how a movie was almost shut down because somebody's agent decided that they didn't like some lines of dialogue that the character was doing. This wasn't the actor who was saying this; this was the actor's agent saying, 'you have to rewrite this because I think it should be different'. They were totally wrong. They were making a decision that they thought was beneficial to their actor's career and not a decision that was going to make the movie any better and that's like, wow.

I'm glad that we have orders of magnitude greater ability to make those decisions that we think are the right ones, that customers will say 'good job' rather than worry that some third party's going to step in and tell us to ship on a particular date or take this out or put this out or whatever.

No, there's no film project in the works right now. The biggest problem was the script. There were a huge number of really bad scripts that were produced. It was easy to look at them and say that these were movies that shouldn't get made. There's no point in making a bad Half-Life movie. The world is full of bad movies and we didn't need to help make another one.

It's pretty easy to say that until we see something on the script side. The script is just the beginning, but if the script is broken there's no reason to go hire a director and get a project greenlit if you look at the script and you say, 'I've seen this movie before and it was terrible the first ten times'. We're not going to do a Half-Life movie until the movie would be as interesting a movie as the game was a game. That's sort of been the challenge. Other than that, just doing a movie for its own sake doesn't make a lot of sense.

Anybody who works on a game has a totally different relationship to somebody who's playing it. I still haven't been able to play Half-Life as a gamer, I still play it as a person who looks at all of the defects because that's just the mindset you get into; when you build a game you're constantly exaggerating what's wrong and ignoring what's right about a game.

Yep. I'm sure that when you look at a piece of your writing...

And that's what helps make you better, right? Focusing on what's good about something isn't nearly as productive as finding the things that are wrong and then fixing as many of those as you can. Everything's sort of grist for the mill, right? Everything's a process. Say I get an email that says 'f*** you, f*** you, you die'. I reply and say, well, and it's surprising how often you get to a useful point. Sometimes you'll just find out that...

Actually we really very rarely... you know, it's the Internet right? People assume I don't read my email, and assume that there's some robot I guess somewhere who reads my email and filters it or something, so if you just reply and say 'What's bothering you' sometimes you just find that their account got hijacked and they're mad at us, they're just mad, and I say, 'Hey, we can fix that' and they go 'Really?' Then we can say 'And hey, here's the IP that your account was hijacked from' and they go 'Oh, okay - that was my cousin.'

He's in trouble now! So you know, it's all grist, whether it's a review, or emails or whatever, it's usually just helpful in the process of making things better the next time.