Gabe Newell, the co-founder of Valve and its subsidiary Steam, has opened up about the video game giants finances.
Valve co-founder and president Gabe Newell recently spoke with Gamasutra this week about how the company handles budgets and financial planning, or more accurately, doesn't do either of those things. Newell spoke about how the company doesn't exactly worry about how much money to spend on developing a game, and thinks more about peoples time above all else.
In Newell's words:
"At Valve, we don't have a budgeting process. There's not like some group of people who go off and say this is how much money we think we're going to make on this title, so that's how many people we're going to assign to work on that project. That's an economy based on that budgetary process. Our economy is based on people's time. That's the scarce commodity."
One of the reasons that Valve - and its biggest product Steam - can afford to think like this is because Newell and presumably Valve have so much money, allowing the company to focus on its customers first, rather than the overheads that plague most modern companies of its size. The Steam owner also went on to say:
"The scarce commodity here is not money -- it's how many hours there are in a day. So everybody is expected to essentially vote on what is most important to our customers by the projects that they work on. So none of the people you saw today [folks who worked on Steam Support, VR, CS:GO, Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2] are working on those projects because somebody else told them to work on them. Everybody's working on those projects because they thought they could make the largest contributions to our customers by working on them. People move around all the time."
This kind of structure has been met with mixed responses, with some singing its praises, and other accusing it of feeling "a lot like high-school." To hear Gabe Newell tell it, though, the methodology is idyllic, and abolishes the need for regular reporting. As Newell says:
"But there's no monthly reports. Nobody says 'I have to update Gabe on the progress of X.' The reality is, they have to update their customers on the progress of X. That's way more important than updating me."
gaming
steam
pc
Valve