Valve Named #1 Most Desirable Game Studio

[Omnomnick]

In a recent survey of 2,200 game developers conducted by the International Game Developers Association, Valve was named as the most desirable studio to work at, beating out other prominent developers and publishers such as Activision Blizzard, BioWare, Ubisoft, Nintendo, and Naughty Dog. Curiously, developers also seemed to prefer getting a job at Valve more so than working for themselves at their own company.

Elsewhere in the survey, developers also named Steam as the most important platform for future growth within the games industry, claiming it to be far more important than a number of other modern gaming platforms such as Android Phones/Tablets, the iPad, traditional consoles (Xbox, Playstation, etc), and the iPhone. This is likely attributed to the continually growing player base present on the platform, recent technological innovations such as SteamVR and In-Home Streaming, and the numerous plans Valve have laid out for the software's future, including the Steam Controller and Steam Machines.

While these figures obviously only represent a certain percentage of video game developers, it is interesting to see Valve's long-standing goal of making their company as desirable as possible provide some real concrete results. After all, that is one great snack room.

 

[Counter-Life™]

Dosen't surprise me. VALVe is love, VALVe is life.

 

[Soupcan]

I'm not surprised. Who doesn't want to work for the almighty GabeN?

 

[Wellwick]

Most desirable company, haven't announced any new games in 3 years XD

 

[Lolcomputer]

Why am I not suprised?

 

[TheWiktor]

Developers want to work at Valve because they are almost like normal people so they want to learn all the secrets about HL3 as well.

 

[-smash-]

Valve is made up of around 300 employees and the company is worth $10's of billions.

Let's see, that's $10,000,000,000 / 300 employees = $33,000,000 per employee (in terms of value, not salary).

I'm sure most of their employees are happy that they get to sleep on beds made from gold bullion.

 

[Vegeta897]

Surely that worth is mostly in the worth of their IPs and services like Steam? Then again I have no education in this area. Either way it's probably a very lucrative employment.

 

[-smash-]

You're probably right. The product is what's sold and revenue is made from that. But, I mean, a company and its business is maintained by its employees, so that's why I sometimes like to think of it in broad strokes - like in terms of worth per employee. I'm not sure if it makes sense to do that, though.

I don't know if you knew this, but income for an employee at Valve is dynamic and heavily based on performance & impact metrics, which is peer-evaluated. So there is certainly potential to make a lot of money as an employee.

"[How pay is determined] is a haphazard process. The payment mechanism is to a very large extent bonus-based. So the contracts usually have a minimum pay segment in it, which is more or less established by tradition. And then the interesting part in this contract is how much is left to the peer review process, which is very complicated. It involves various layers of mutual assessment... In companies like Microsoft or elsewhere, usually the bonus is something between 8, 15, 20 percent of the basic salary. In Valve, I'm told, there's no upper limit to bonuses. Bonuses can end up being 5, 6, 10 times the level of the basic wage... Gabe [Newell] had this view from the beginning. He wanted a community of partners, he didn't want to be the boss of anyone or to be bossed around by anyone" (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/187296/How_Valve_hires_how_it_fires_and_how_much_it_pays.php).

I'm sure that the freedom of creative expression and self governing teams are valuable as well for those that can handle it.

 

[Acurt1982]

i want to work at valve so i can sit on my ass all day and collect hat money

 

[Omnomnick]

i want to work at valve so i can sit on my ass all day and collect hat money

Then the February performance review comes around...

 

[Wheaties-Of-Doom]

It's amazing how far a little ingenuity, some quality customer service, and a crap load of dis-conventional business practices can get you.

(Yeah, take that, conventional business practices. You suck.)

 

[BabyHeadCrab]

How does Rockstar keep employees around making great products? They seem terrible as **** to work for.