Valve Corporation is an American video game company known for massive successes like the Steam marketplace, the Half-life Series, Team Fortress, Portal, and much more. It is a private company founded by Gabe Newell & Mike Harrington in 1996. Being private it is hard to get exact numbers but it is estimated to worth $XX billion dollars.
Now I am not a big video game kind of person these days but one could stop and wonder - what leads to so many of Valve's releases being absolutely adored by fans (and raking in $$$)? Surely we see everybody and their mother making video games these days with things like Unity and Unreal engines making the process so streamlined and app stores gladly taking a cut to help distribute said games - what is different with Valve? How, as not one the "big guys" like EA, Nintendo, or Ubisoft, have they managed to carve out such a nice chunk of the market?
The following video proposes that the key to this is an obsession on making things quickly and getting feedback quickly.
In one part of the video it even says a group of game developers pitched Valve the demo of what was to become the Portal video game. Valve hired the whole team and tasked them with rewriting it in their engine and within the Half-life game universe. But here is the kicker..... the team got started and Valve made them playtest it (let non-developers play it and provide feedback) within one week of starting! They didn't even have more than one room of the game done at that time!
So my question is - how can we better apply these principles to our own businesses folks?
Now I am not a big video game kind of person these days but one could stop and wonder - what leads to so many of Valve's releases being absolutely adored by fans (and raking in $$$)? Surely we see everybody and their mother making video games these days with things like Unity and Unreal engines making the process so streamlined and app stores gladly taking a cut to help distribute said games - what is different with Valve? How, as not one the "big guys" like EA, Nintendo, or Ubisoft, have they managed to carve out such a nice chunk of the market?
The following video proposes that the key to this is an obsession on making things quickly and getting feedback quickly.
In one part of the video it even says a group of game developers pitched Valve the demo of what was to become the Portal video game. Valve hired the whole team and tasked them with rewriting it in their engine and within the Half-life game universe. But here is the kicker..... the team got started and Valve made them playtest it (let non-developers play it and provide feedback) within one week of starting! They didn't even have more than one room of the game done at that time!
So my question is - how can we better apply these principles to our own businesses folks?
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