this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2024
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Steam Deck
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This actually is basically how Valve works.
They have a pretty small team, and Steam is a fucking money printer.
They are a private company, not public.
That means no shareholders. No need to jam out a product to keep stock prices up, no boards of directors that also sit on 12 other boards that are all scheming to figure out how to push the whole industry toward stupid bullshit like NFT game items or 'replace all our employees with AI' or 'every game is actually just a marketing tool for MTX or battlepasses.'
(The entire idea of loot boxes and in game microtransactions was basically just another 'i wonder what would happen if, or if it would even be possible to...' and then the steam marketplace of ingame items was born, and then basically every one else copied them, poorly.)
(Fuck, its basically the same with modern in game achievements as well.)
...
They could do nothing other than maintain their existing products and basically just coast on that forever, remaining profitable.
Because they have essentially no hard deadlines to put out some new product... this enables them to have a very loose, very voluntary, workplace culture which emphasizes quality over quantity, creativity over 'its the same game in a new setting', as well as not rushing anything.
A whole lot of their projects in the last decade are just people saying 'I'm gonna do this' and then if anyone else thinks its cool or neat, they work on it too.
People are allowed and encouraged to contribute to any project, at any time, as opposed to basically all other corporate software studios that have very rigid and defined roles.
Some projects will end up being a waste of resources, but others end up printing a ton of money.
Found the Buisness major
That user legitimately spends all day posting pedantic BS lmao, this is hilarious.
Literally the archetype of le Reddit neckbeard to a tee, Christ what a loser
... and they've now deleted all their posts.
I do have to say this has been amusing... haven't seen this caliber of very obviously wrong but actually no you're wrong in a while.
EDIT: Wow, no, holy shit, their entire account is gone now.
holy shit, talk about going nuclear. he should have just taken the L, learned from this and moved on...
this is how I know you've never created anything, lol. lots of times, you fail at making something, but you learn from those failures.
who knows what other projects they threw money at and failed, the only one I can think of rn were the steam machines.
I'm sure they learned from those mistakes, tried again, and here we are with the steam deck
thats called R&D. I don't personally spend millions of dollars, but I do spend money on things that never pan out but teach me a lot of lessons I can apply to my next project
It's not as strict as you are trying to make it out to be. My favorite job ever was a small company. The owner was fine with us programmers just working on pet projects on company time. I was goofing around at some point and ended up writing us some code that ended up being kind of a workshop for some code that us programmers would have to sit and work on. It allowed non-programmers to set up the same conditions and handled the 'code' part internally. It was all because I was just goofing around with program ideas and eventually got to that point where I had my eureka moment. I didn't set out to waste company time and money, but the end result paid off in droves, which is exactly how it sounds like the deck came to be. Another programmers goofy side project turned into an accounting package that we ended up tying into our actual product. If our boss/owner had been looking at it the way you are describing, none of that would have come to fruition, but look at all the money he would have saved not letting us programmers do what we did. /s
If I owned a multimillion dollar company, probably yeah. There’s a limit but for a groundbreaking company the RCA labs are more a warning of “but they actually have to complete projects at some point and have direction” than a “everything needs to be rigidly directed”.
“Hey I have an idea for something I’d like to exist” is quite possibly one of the best things a business owner can hear out of an R&D engineer’s mouth. You provide oversight in accordance with the risk factors established by your financials, business plan, and how good of an idea it is. But if a bunch of them like it as a product that’s a good sign.
It's not a waste of resources if you learn something. Think of this as research rather than product development. You can try many things (from VR, to miniaturised computers, to cloud gaming, controllers with wonky form factors...) to see what results in a good experience. You don't need to get anywhere near a full fledged product to understand those things, so the waste of resources isn't massive anyway.
I'd bet at the moment people decided "this is useful, I even want this for me, so let's turn it into a product" the steam deck looked more like a screen, a gamepad and a raspberry pi all taped together or jammed into a 3d printed prototype chassis.
If people have spare capacity to work on these projects, the material cost at such a point can be under <5k which is peanuts for a company like Valve.
Good thing you weren't working at steam, huh.
That's pretty much the point. The steam deck was a huge success, but the only reason it could exist and be such a success was because they had the freedom to do what they liked and not worry about management with attitudes like yours.
Do you really, truly believe that everything that's never been done before is a 100% sure bet to invest time and money into?
Do you really have no idea of how complex, untested, but potentially viable ideas come to fruition, come to be found out as coherent and workable vs incoherent and non workable?
... You are aware that matchsticks were essentially invented by the scattershot approach of a man who just had the time, funding, and materials to just basically randomly test a whole bunch of chemical compounds, and he just happened to accidentally drag a stick covered in concoction #38 or whatever against a hearth, whereupon it burst into flame?
... Do you think the Wright Brothers, or any other early experiments of developing flying machines... or all those involved in early rocketry... do you think all of those people were 100% sure that each of their designs would work?
Nothing worth doing is ever worth doing just for money. You'll never innovate if you never put time into projects simply for practice, or better still, enjoyment.
Steam made Valve more than $2,000,000,000 in 2021.
They have infinite money forever.
Gabe Newell runs a biotech company as well.
A couple million on a blue-sky product development pipeline is an incidental cost for the most part.
... What?
It... it goes into the company.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24197477/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-payroll-redacted
They run an absurdly profitable business.
They make approximately $15 million in profit per each of the roughly 360 employees.
That's after wages.
Nobody knows exactly what an average Valve salary is (they're a private company, they have no obligation to disclose that), but they almost certainly just continue to accumulate a stupendous amount of money, which they can then throw at any ideas that require all kinds of potential material or licensing or technical costs.
The employees are not making $15 million dollars a year. Probably more like 1/10 to 1/100 of that.
The steam deck is making them money, that was a product developed by fucking around.
It seems that you can only think of value in terms of making a profit. But there is also great value in making something to see what is possible, regardless of profit. If you can't see that, you'll never make something innovative. The best a mindset like that can ever achieve is only incremental.
This conversation is enlightening to me. See I just always assumed business people understood how engineering works, but were being obtuse to keep us on track or were just looking at the financial spreadsheets. But no it seems some people genuinely don’t understand that sometimes you spend a lot of time on things whether or not it goes anywhere because if you don’t you don’t develop any products or solutions.
Unironically, this is why I no longer work in tech.
Another user pointed out 'Found the business major' and while that may or may not be 100% accurate... this person's mindset is absolutely, hilariously, stereotypically common amongst MBAs.
They know almost nothing about the actual business sector they end up in, they know almost nothing about the nature of any given employee's actual work, they just view everything through the lense of 'maximize next quarter profits'...
... It's all just 100% cocksure narcissistic bravado + 'the way i was taught how to things work is correct, stop arguing with me.'
And these people are almost always your boss, or your boss's boss.
This person is an idiot and can only think of one possibility. They are ignoring the fact that fucking around on the job can have implications like increasing skills. I made the mistake of replying to this person with an anecdote of mine which I am sure will be deconstructed by them like they were there. Point is, boss allowed us to goof off with pet programming projects and that resulted in me experimenting with code I wouldn't have had the chance to otherwise and making a breakthrough, which I then realized how to implement for the benefit of said company. So I wasn't fucking around to make money, but the fucking around gave me the knowledge and skills to them apply that indirectly. But hey this person is determined to infect the thread with their single minded theory that doesn't make a shit to the actual conversation.
I don't know how you read that from what I said, or how I could have "said this as if" anything. It's a fact that stands alone.
Do you think that devs and engineers pay for prototypes themselves?
Whatever bud, enjoy being convinced you're right so hard that you get mad at other people I guess. I guess the end result of the steam machine project or the steam controller or the index or the vive or the steam deck and multiple people at Valve describing that's how it works are just not real because how they came to exist at all don't make sense to you.
it's frustrating and difficult to talk to you about this issue. I still am confused as to the point that you have. Feel free to continue to attempt to explain it, but I'm not interested in continuing to talk to you. Thank you for your time.
I was leaving you the option to do so instead of telling you to stop as a courtesy. Considering you would rather not, I will change my approach to hopefully better suit you:
Stop replying to me. I do not want to talk to you.
When you have a stable business with a guaranteed source of huge amounts of revenue, that all you have to do is basically maintain at a very low cost...
Most other revenue can be thrown at whatever, in a how ever long it takes to do well and properly timeframe.
Actual innovation requires a series of creative ideas that are explored thoroughly, without overwhelming pressure or influence on decision making, or timetables.
Valve's position allows them to do this.
Lots of those things go no where, but a good number of them work out, and basically revolutionize the industry, more than making up for the projects that do not work out.
As a certain wise old man once said:
"These things, they take time."