For years, with some reports claiming as long as 20 years, Valve has offered employees paid trips to Hawaii to relax and unwind. In a rare and amusing look into what it’s like working at Valve and the folks the company attracts, engineer Fletcher Dunn recently confirmed that he’s enjoying the latest Valve Hawaii trip the only way he knows how: with his nose in a laptop.
“I am on the Valve vacation in Hawaii, which is just a wonderful perk of this job, it is such a great luxury, I love it,” Dunn said in a Twitter post on April 15, sparking what I assume was more discussion than he anticipated.
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Moments and comments like this, and the many posts and reactions they inspire – mixtures of disbelief, incredulous praise, and envy – highlight the strange culture orbiting Valve. Not in Valve, among employees, but outside it, among fans. And fans feels like the right word.
This culture is strange because it exists at all. Perhaps because Steam is so central to PC gaming, used by so many millions of people, there’s an uncommon sense of investment, interest, and attachment sometimes bordering on parasocial toward the company behind the platform. People really like to know what Valve is doing, and often meet any discovery with the same gushing enthusiasm that they do a Steam sale flush with 90% discounts.
Beyond operating the go-to PC gaming emporium, Valve has also made several of the best games of all time. Portal is one of few games I would describe as functionally perfect. Games also cultivate investment by giving players a sense of participating – the same reason, I’ve long speculated, that games attract such vocal armchair experts who mistake their experience for expertise and consequently waste their own, potentially very valuable feedback. So, many Steam users may feel doubly attached.
Beneath posts riffing on Dunner’s vacation news, many people unflatteringly compare the Valve vacation to the recent Epic Games layoffs. Epic, of course, operates its own PC gaming store and hopes to win enough market share to become undeniably relevant alongside Steam. Epic did not win any hopes by laying off over 1,000 people, purportedly due to declines in Fortnite, the game known for making all the money in the world and convincing countless publishers that they, too, could have all the money if they simply made the next Fortnite. It also didn’t help that billionaire CEO Tim Sweeney immediately described the people he’d knowingly help thrust into a famously dire job market as world-class employees.
It helps that Valve, notably not a publicly traded company, has done a pretty good job of things. Steam is king for a reason. Half-Life was pretty good, you may have heard. I’ve been to Valve HQ, and spoken and listened to some Valve people, and they seemed nice. The company earns (very literal) brownie points for sending chocolate to especially successful game developers who put their game on Steam, and thus paid and earned Valve a whole bunch of money. Valve attracts enormous talent, like the makers of roguelike icon Risk of Rain. And by many numbers, Valve shames outwardly villainous and rudderless companies like Meta.
Yet this sort of gladiatorial contest – Steam has trounced Epic in the cage match I just imagined – to me demonstrates how this culture can blunt necessary caution. Epic deserves criticism, and not just for these layoffs, and a vacation shouldn’t distract from why. And Valve still deserves scrutiny, particularly as its old guard retires. Valve is a company, and one that commands enormous influence over a huge and fast-growing gaming platform.
It’s important to examine and remember how it reacts to (or exerts) censorial pressure, for example, because Steam is essential to the lives of many game developers and, more distantly, is regarded as essential by many players. As long as Valve is run by fallible humans, it will never be the infallible pro-consumer bastion that it’s sometimes treated as, and we ought to remember that even and especially as we stampede toward Steam sales at the church of Gabe Newell.
I am, believe it or not, not trying to be a party pooper. You will often find me nodding along with communications from Valve. But this type of post happens a little too often, and I think it’s important not to treat Valve with kid gloves no matter how genuinely likable or agreeable it can be. Treatment of what Valve is today shouldn’t weaken the treatment of what Valve could very feasibly become. And frankly, there’s something darkly pitiable about celebrating enormously profitable companies treating employees well, exoticizing what should be a norm, however it’s expressed (less lavishly than Hawaii).
But you know what? I wouldn’t complain about free chocolate or a paid vacation, either, and I do hope people enjoy them.
Valve admits it’s “time to make some bigger improvements” to Steam’s mod system, drops massive Steam Workshop update with “completely rewritten” pages.
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