What can you learn from Valve on iteratively providing value?

[Bounce Back]

Valve Corporation is an American video game company known for massive successes like the Steam marketplace, the Half-life Series, Team Fortress, Portal, and much more. It is a private company founded by Gabe Newell & Mike Harrington in 1996. Being private it is hard to get exact numbers but it is estimated to worth $XX billion dollars.

Now I am not a big video game kind of person these days but one could stop and wonder - what leads to so many of Valve's releases being absolutely adored by fans (and raking in $$$)? Surely we see everybody and their mother making video games these days with things like Unity and Unreal engines making the process so streamlined and app stores gladly taking a cut to help distribute said games - what is different with Valve? How, as not one the "big guys" like EA, Nintendo, or Ubisoft, have they managed to carve out such a nice chunk of the market?

The following video proposes that the key to this is an obsession on making things quickly and getting feedback quickly.

In one part of the video it even says a group of game developers pitched Valve the demo of what was to become the Portal video game. Valve hired the whole team and tasked them with rewriting it in their engine and within the Half-life game universe. But here is the kicker..... the team got started and Valve made them playtest it (let non-developers play it and provide feedback) within one week of starting! They didn't even have more than one room of the game done at that time!

So my question is - how can we better apply these principles to our own businesses folks?

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

Valve Corporation is an American video game company known for massive successes like the Steam marketplace, the Half-life Series, Team Fortress, Portal, and much more. It is a private company founded by Gabe Newell & Mike Harrington in 1996. Being private it is hard to get exact numbers but it is estimated to worth $XX billion dollars.

Now I am not a big video game kind of person these days but one could stop and wonder - what leads to so many of Valve's releases being absolutely adored by fans (and raking in $$$)? Surely we see everybody and their mother making video games these days with things like Unity and Unreal engines making the process so streamlined and app stores gladly taking a cut to help distribute said games - what is different with Valve? How, as not one the "big guys" like EA, Nintendo, or Ubisoft, have they managed to carve out such a nice chunk of the market?

The following video proposes that the key to this is an obsession on making things quickly and getting feedback quickly.

In one part of the video it even says a group of game developers pitched Valve the demo of what was to become the Portal video game. Valve hired the whole team and tasked them with rewriting it in their engine and within the Half-life game universe. But here is the kicker..... the team got started and Valve made them playtest it (let non-developers play it and provide feedback) within one week of starting! They didn't even have more than one room of the game done at that time!

So my question is - how can we better apply these principles to our own businesses folks?

Seems like a revised version of Act, Assess, Adjust ... now Act, Playtest, Assess, Adjust.

 

[random_username]

Now I am not a big video game kind of person these days but one could stop and wonder - what leads to so many of Valve's releases being absolutely adored by fans (and raking in $$$)?

Because they can kill 999 projects and 1 can survive to be a hit. Other game companies don't have that luxury, either because of cash or because of shareholder greed. Games are incredibly hard and costly to make. Even getting a one game, in whatever state out, is worthy of utmost respect. Valve is a marketplace that is richer than god and is a private company which allows it to do whatever they want.

I like Valve, and I think what Valve did with Steam Deck is going to be an absolute game changer for desktop industry. It's the second or third domino that will start the fall of rotten core that is Windows operating system. But they are not a game company first and foremost, they are a marketplace. If anything, that is the most important lesson we can all learn from Valve, get incredibly rich with your own business and stay in and around it, so you do things your own way.