This means people there don't do unglamorous things like maintenance and stability fixes.

In practice, makers are different people from polishers, and Valve's system of hiring the "best" (people with impressive CVs) and salaries based on stack ranking means there is a huge bias towards makers (Who brought the company more money? the person who helped roll out dota2 or the person who fixed edge cases in the steam client?).

Many of Valve's products are full of bugs that don't get fixed for years. And since they only hire the "best", they don't have any testers. Many times patches are released that cause servers to crash within seconds (tf2 falling damage crash). And sometimes they release them on Friday which means it doesn't get fixed until Monday (Overflow error writing string table baseline crash). These patches were also mandatory.

Edit: though, to contradict myself, this is still as gameable as all hell if you do something silly like connecting it to reward and punishment.

We're into No True Scotsman territory here.

GOOD programmers know a lot of things. Put them in an environment that saps their initiative and they do 1 of 3 things: Leave, succumb or adapt.

The only thing that works is deliberately cultivating a culture where driving out the old bads is as important as creating the new goods.

Put another way: for self-direction to work, the culture needs to rank improvements as highly as novelty. Possibly higher.

Which it never does. At least, I have yet to experience or hear of a (software) engineering culture in which that's true.

I'm not sure if cultures like Toyota or the Nuclear Navy can be considered under this heading, as they mostly worked at a procedural-improvement level, rather than a product-improvement level.

This means people there don't do unglamorous things like maintenance and stability fixes.

How to create an incentive for this kind of work is an interesting problem, and I don't know enough about Valve to know if they've solved it.

I will say that the alternative is more dysfunctional. Closed-allocation, corporate alternative: some number of people are staffed on the ugly, career-damaging maintenance projects. The good ones either find a way to play the politics and move, or they quit, the bad ones stay. The end result is that the maintenance work is done by incompetents who don't care. This is a big part of why most legacy code only gets worse over time: the maintenance work is given to people who don't have the clout to do anything else, not to people who care enough about the health of the project to do it well.

As for the DRM... has it ever really been onerous? The only case I think of is if you don't always have access to an internet connection, and they have workarounds for that, though they admittedly are imperfect.

True, the hypothetical/potential failure modes suck - being locked out of your account and losing your games; Valve goes out of business and you lose your games; you're offline and can't switch to offline mode and thus can't play your games until you find an internet connection. That said, I've always been of the impression that most people don't mind Steam's DRM that much because doesn't stop them from doing what they generally expect to be able to do and want to do with their PC games, which is sit down at any PC where they can log in on Steam and play them. This is unlike DRMed music and movie files: sure, DRM prevents you from making unlimited free copies for your friends, which I think most anyone would agree is reasonable, but it also can prevent you from doing things like changing formats or resolutions or storing/viewing from certain devices.

I think the interesting part is that in spite of that past behavior and almost no PR, the gaming community just rallies around Valve and will vilify most other publishers that attempt to follow Valve's footsteps with Steam.

No one I know found the always-online aspects of Steam particularly onerous. Especially because when it was introduced, it was mostly used for games that were only interesting online anyway. HL mods, HL2 and mods. That "no one I know" is just anecdata, I admit it. And it integrates features that are actually features. E.g. Steam friends-chat is actually useful, unlike all other inter-game chat I've seen (on the PC).

And the Steam store is such a boon. It makes me want to give game-devs money. As my disposable income has grown (massively), Steam was in the right place at the right time. Brick and mortar game stores don't exactly inspire loyalty. And I like the fact that digital distribution lowers intermediate costs, and I like the fact that I get a share of that savings with the crazy-deep-discount steam store sales.

On the other hand, I can't remember the last time I interacted with DRM from another publisher without being afraid, and without paying a burden that actually was onerous. It messes with my router, or it turns out to be an exploitable rootkit, or it pops up inexplicable warnings, or it eats RAM, or I have to create an online account for one stupid game that I don't even know if I'll like yet, or...

I agree with nlawalker.... getting us acclimatized as a precondition of playing Must Play games (online HL mods after 2003, HL2, Portal) was brilliant.

Of course, if Valve in their wisdom were to decide my account was violating TOS, I'd be pretty boned.

http://autodesk.blogs.com/between_the_lines/2013/01/get-free...

Steam's DRM is only offensive in theory. In practice, it works perfectly well for the vast majority of the users for the vast majority of the time.

I used to pirate games left, right, and center. I would occasionally buy a new one if it had a good rep or I liked the series, but the default mode was 'pirate'. Since the A500 days (yo-ho, yo-ho, a pirate's life for me!). It also helped that the Australian software market is rapaciously overpriced.

Steam changed that. Steam didn't get rid of the DRM, but it added convenience like never before seen. Almost all the problems with DRM affecting the legitimate user are gone - I've never encountered a 'licensing server offline' or an 'invalid code' and only one 'sorry, licensing too busy, try again later'. I've rarely had a 'failed to install', and when I have, a 'try again' pretty much worked. The same can't be said of my experience with boxed software or pirated software. Updates are relatively seamless - Steam is acting like a package manager here, avoiding the need for everything to run its own updater. It's also a lot easier to check on any sales steam might be running - not so easy with a brick-and-mortar store(s); rare is the store website that shows the right level of stock and is regularly updated with specials.

Now, to be fair, I didn't start with steam at the inception, I've only been on for four or five years (it did get installed when HL2 came out, but I never got the sequels so didn't bother with it for a while), and when I started pirating I was a student and when I started steam I was working full-time, but even so, the convenience of being able to buy software from a trusted source and install it without having to leave the room made all the difference.

Steam does have its problems - the client is clunky (and has no tabs, grr - it's built on IE) and sometimes games can surprise you if your internet is out and they are 'online required' (which is usually invisible otherwise).

One argument that I noticed changed over the many years is "But online DRM means I won't own the game if I want to play it in X years". I've played a lot of games over the years. I return to very few - once a game is played out, it's gotta be pretty extraordinary to make it to my replay list. I still think DRM sucks, but it's largely irrelevant once the game is done.

Nope, they switched to Webkit a couple years ago. [1] (Still no tabs though..)

>I still think DRM sucks, but it's largely irrelevant once the game is done.

Wouldn't the success of something like GOG [2] kind of prove that there's a market and a reason for DRM-free games? I all but guarantee 20 years down the road, we'll still be playing games from this generation.

1. http://store.steampowered.com/uiupdate/

2. http://www.gog.com/

Sure, absolutely. I was talking in terms of my own experience with that line. I'd prefer there were no DRM, and as makomk says above, it causes problems to others that I don't see. I just meant that that one particular argument of "no ownership in X years" didn't hold much water with me personally.

This being said, I have bought System Shock 2 twice and lost it both times (once stolen, I think) and today I have been playing a pirated version (hooray for the new texture mods). That game is one of the exceptions :)

But, selfishly, if I could buy every GOG game on Steam, GOG wouldn't get a penny of my money. I value the Steam features more than I value the DRM-free-ness. I'm befuddled that this is my position, but it is.

a) it doesn't affect the consumption experience too negatively. b) the platforms pros (e.g. ease of distribution) outweigh the cons (i.e. DRM)

I can't remember the last time I cursed Steam's DRM system, honestly. Most of the time I don't even think about it.

Edit: I forgot the Sales. Those damn Steam Sales get me every time.

Seems worthwhile to mention the (leaked?) Valve Handbook. It explains a lot of this stuff: http://newcdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf

Steam is the most critical part of the company for their future.

Considering Valve Corp as a whole supposedly has a total of only about 400 employees and is acting as a developer house, publisher, and 3rd party distribution system rolled into one, I think they've got a pretty fantastic churn rate.

EDIT: Just want to say I wasn't the one who downvoted you.

I know what you mean, but apart from Portal 2 the rest does not really qualify from development from scratch (even Portal 2 is dubious on that aspect, since it takes all the mecanisms from the previous games and expands on it). While I love what they do as a distributor and very much appreciate what they do for Linux support, as a pure game developer they fall short of expectations, and they have not done anything very original for a while. For a company with a "flat organization" that is somehow disappointing.