Valve has laid off 13 employees, mostly VR engineers
67 replies, posted
Working at Valve must be stressful knowing you could be fired at any time because the higher ups no longer see your work as worthwhile.
This makes less sense than if EA fired everyone and hired marketing people with the best penny pinching tactics possible.
Unless Valve LITERALY doesn't know what else to do.
Bizarre number of people on Reddit saying this is probably just because their work was complete. Do they think Nintendo/MS/Sony fires all their engineers as soon as a console is finished and then hires new ones as needed??
Yeah I highly doubt that Brandon & NODE will ever give in to Valve, but that doesn't mean that Valve won't try to buy them out.
This is pretty much how most companies work, Valve is probably one of the better game companies in this regard seeing as you've got people like Activision who fire people after reporting record profits so then it doesn't matter how worthwhile your work is, you'll get fucked even if things go well.
so uh, what's boneworks? I live in a cave, you understand.
is this game called boneworks because it grows boners?
Because I have a big bone myself right now
This.
It was the only bit of hardware that I was actually looking forward too...
Yeah and the rare time that they mention Half Life 3 they say they're "working" on that too
I'll believe Valve has been working on games when one gets fucking released
It's been almost 8 years since Portal 2 came out. The Valve that makes single-player games is dead. Even Dota 2 came out in 2013, after CS:GO in 2012.
Unless you mistake that disaster of a card game for something worth noting, Valve hasn't made released anything meaningful in years.
The problem with Valve is that Gabe isn't a good leader so you just end up with an office full of directionless projects that rarely go anywhere.
The people laid off were focused on hardware which was the foundation for the software application to work on. The hardware team was "barebones" last time I talked to anyone in hardware. Remember, traditional hardware teams are a lot larger then valve had at their highest point. especially R&D and valve hardware had to carry hats from R&D to mass production. This is most likely a slow brexit from hardware all together, but we'll see in the upcoming months. Maybe keep tabs on eevblog's podcast if that's still going as a few valve engineers went on the show and got to talk a lot about their work. *shrugs*
Remember, they still work in a cabal. Somehow people got this idea (especially here in facepunch), that the hardware side took resources away from other departments, they only thing they took away was other people getting a bigger paycheck with how valve distributes money. Valve has had in the past a schism within the company with abandoning source2 for unreal or unity to make left 4 dead and half life, that side of development had little to deal with hardware.
It used to be that you had to worry about people leaving your cabal in order to complete a task, but if you left valve or valve left you other companies would early pick you up. The people I know to were former employees got great jobs soon after, even their dream jobs more or less.
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Sources
Looks like this has all been blown grossly out of proportion.
They might fire some of their engineers if they're confident they don't want to pursue further hardware development.
Those questions and answers are way to vague though.
Valve must be a great place to work if you're looking to earn a paycheck and not add much to your portfolio. Other developers expect their teams to actually release products.
Just as i wanted to get into VR and wait for what Steam would announce/release.
That sucks
Well you were doing it wrong.
Same with any other company, really.
Boneworks is just a game, in the gameplay videos they're using a Vive with the Knuckles controllers. The knuckles/gameplay/graphics is why it's considered next gen.
This is literally what they say every time when things start falling apart.
Its not 'grossly misinformed'.
After his AMA statement that "we're working on a single player game" turned out to mean a fucking Artifact single player mode, I am going to assume from this point on that anything that comes out of Gabe's fat gob is a half-truth at best.
Partially true, but the game is also considered to be pretty good. A majority of other VR games don't really have any physics besides what you can actually pick up, and even then it's pretty janky.
The only game I've ever thought to have pretty decent physics in VR (that I've played) was Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades, and even then the physics was primarily focused on just the guns. You could still stick your hands through tables and shit.
Where as Boneworks is probably going to be a game with one of the most advanced physics in VR just in general. The considered things other games don't even consider when it comes to physics and I overall look forward to playing it when it releases. I'm sure it will be a blast!
I had a similar experience. There's this wonderful little VR Arcade (Literally called VRcade) in Dubuque, Iowa owned by actual developers of VR games, that has a bunch of different rooms in which you can play a dozen of the best VR titles currently on the market for the Vive. It's a great experience and anyone else nearby I'd suggest you go as well, but if not I would really suggest finding your nearest VR Arcade and going. It's a great way to get the experience of VR without having to actually buy a headset and it's a nice outing if you go with friends, and typically these places have better facilities for you to play VR in than an apartment or tiny living room.
Am I the only one that loves the steam controller, its in my top 3 controllers. Tho, my top 3 are Xbox Duke Controller, Gamecube, then Steam Controller.
I like the controller a lot but I'd be lying if I haven't had some cases where I wished I had a regular controller instead. Something to do with the trackpad being a tad more difficult than an analog stick for games that use them a lot.
Its great for shooters, shit for some types of games. its like half-and-half for 3rd person games. But you can say this really with any controller. Also, that 99.9% of games aren't designed around using it with trackpad aimming, but it works as well as it does, is a amazing.
Also, rather use the steam controller on a couch for games not design for controllers than an xbox/ps controller. works better even using steam's controller stuff.
except IBM does do a lot of stuff in the commercial field, valve is 100% a consumer oriented company.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff_vqf-JklE
its my favourite controller, i still use mine all the time! its definitely not a controller for everyone, since there's a decent learning curve to it, and the trackpads can be off-putting at first - but if you can get past that it's one of the best controllers you can get, i think.
with enough time you can throw almost any game at it and have it work well, i've been playing through Hollow Knight and Nier:Automata with it and its worked beautifully for both of them
i think some people bought one and expected to be able to play an FPS or something with it right out of the box - when really you need to spend time working with it, seeing what works for your play style, what's comfortable for you. of course, there's all sorts of community configs you can use, which can be a big help either as a starting point for your own config or just as one to use.
that angle of the controller isn't something everyone's going to like obviously - if you need something you can use out of the box, there's already a huge amount of controllers you could get -
but if you're willing to learn how the config system works, and tweak things when needed, the benefits of the steam controller are pretty clear, at least to me
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