Valve has laid off 13 employees, mostly VR engineers - Sensationalist Headlines

https://uploadvr.com/valve-employees-vr-2019/

Refocusing the company on DLC for Artifact

Vr is the one interesting thing valve was pushing. If they drop this I'm dropping my interest in valve entirely

What the hell is Valve's angle supposed to be now?

They're a product service company now like say IBM. You depend in IBM services and products but you never hear of IBM doing anything interesting.

Except Watson exists.

Valve doesn't even know. Pretty Gabe just sits in the meeting rooms asking people what they think they should do and saying no to everything.

Steam Controller (recommend it's very cool)

Cross post from the VNN video on this but. My money is on Boneworks rattled Valve enough to scrap half of their HW team because the Boneworks team got to next gen VR faster than Valve. Valve Time has really bit them in the ass. And watch as the Boneworks team get offered to work for or get bought out by Valve in order to own the IP.

Should've fired the people who thought artifact was a good idea.

holy shit valve did something that has the number 3 in it for once

uuh they just fired the team that made the steam controller

Wonder if Alan Yates, the architect of Valve's Lighthouse system, is among the employees laid off. The status of his firing/continued employment at Valve would a glimpse into the health of Valve's VR projects.

VR, and not the people that made Artifact? Who's the idiot in charge here?

i know this isn't very significant evidence, but wouldn't it be possible to some extent that this could signify valve's return to video games? they already said they're working on three new games, none of which include artifact

Here's hoping this doesn't affect Knuckles, their one interesting product.

Used it for about 5 minutes and it was the biggest pile of wank I'd ever used.

For fuck's sake, VR was like the one interesting thing that Valve has done for the last five years

I remember testing one at GDC back when they were the hip new thing to play some Portal 2 and just thinking "wow, I'd much rather be holding a standard controller right now."

I think VR is insanely cool based on a recent experience. I got to play a VR game in Orlando - and boy it was fucking amazing. They give you the backpacks and the headset and you enter a grey box, suit up with some buddies and go thru a linear zombie shooter. All the doors function as you expect them to, there are levers, secret drawers, and vibrations / wind effects to immerse you into the game, and you can pick up your guns and everything. It was a bit easy and short, but an amazing concept for future games. The best part was when you're done you take the mask off to some girl just awkwardly staring at you after you looked like a complete moron for 15 minutes. I personally don't think I want to use VR at home, but when I'm playing at that little arcade I can see myself playing thru that shit all day. Put me on an actual floor. I want to freely move about, interact stuff in the world without controllers, and play different scenarios with friends. One of the coolest experiences I've done so far. I hope it spreads out to more areas and more games become available.

The fucked part of VR is that its extremely profitable and popular, but could still die for a bit due to companies simply not being competent.

I'm not sure how "VR Engineers Among Them" is suddenly "mostly VR engineers".

oh man I live near Orlando and that sounds sick as fuck, where was it at?

Nomadic

Statement from Valve: Last month, 13 full time employees were let go and a portion of our contractor agreements were terminated. It’s an unfortunate part of business, but does not represent any major changes at the company. We thank those affected for their contribution and wish them well in future endeavors. i'm pretty sure they weren't needed anymore

The remaining ones, anyway.

Valves focus on hardware was doomed from day one. When they launched the Steamboxes and Steamcontrollers they had no focus on how to make them a reality, just made some partnerships with a few companies, showed of a few models on their website and launched a mediocre Steam distro that never really got updated. Gabe at one point even said something about being jealous of how Nintendo's hardware output works compared to theirs but the difference is that Nintendo has focus, you can't just shove a bunch of people in a room and let them do whatever they want and expect them to come up with some cool gaming hardware, you need focus and structure. Valve's open structure probably worked well for Half-Life 1 and most of their other games but you can't run a whole company based around that.

Terminal velocity

Brandon and all the team members behind Boneworks I doubt will join Valve. He seems very passionate about VR and left a very successful YouTube channel to pursue it, and he likely enjoys it being an indie company and not getting bogged down in the corporate bullshit that Valve has been known for, for so long. Let's face it, if they all worked at Valve and even remotely proposed the idea of Boneworks to them, they would let them work on it (maybe), but wouldn't have given them any funding or overall support. Tbh I'd be surprised if they even would have let them started it. Valve seems to have a hard-on for Artifact atm despite it being a huge failure.

An arcade in one of the malls here had a VR setup for some time, when I visited it recently during winter to get my dumb fix and try to beat my score on some shoot em up vr game the entire setup had disappeared real shame, but since the VR setup isnt anywhere deep in the arcade, but rather right around the outside, I'm pretty sure everyone going to the theatre across and people sitting on the tables eating fast food have probably been watching me looking like a complete idiot wearing weird goggles for 10 minutes.