Valve Developers Express Surprise Over Players’ Joy at Minor Updates

Some Team Fortress 2 fans have spent many years waiting for a major update.

Valve veteran Chet Faliszek recently released a new video discussing how the company views the player reaction to updates for games like Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike.

According to Faliszek, Valve employees are often surprised when players react with joy even to small updates:

You know, I wanted to address a comment: someone was complaining that updates are often small—like for Counter-Strike or even TF2, although sometimes major updates come out. Even within 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 scam you… just that other projects have thousands of people working on them making a bunch of different stuff, and then Valve comes out and is like, “Here are five skins.” And people are like, “Cool.”

Faliszek shared that inside Valve, employees sometimes think along the lines of “we are just getting lucky.” However, he noted that success is not entirely accidental. Valve games are built by relatively small teams, and the fact that the creators are “on the same wavelength” can be felt in the games they make:

There were times when I worked there that 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 this popular. It’s crazy. It’s great. And I think part of that success was that everyone was on the same wavelength and working together—and you can see that in the game. And when you have a team of 500 people, that cohesion gets lost.

Of course, Faliszek explains, you can make good games in large teams too. Yet if you add more employees to companies like Valve, which lacks a formal management structure, it could lead to a bad result: “management structures would emerge on the fly and be ‘unhealthy,’ and that wouldn’t do any good either.”

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