2010

I was a gamer kid who wanted to make games professionally, and playing TF2 and gmod on a good PC for the first time was one of those "staring up into the sky, mouth agape, as heavenly light shines down upon you" kind of moments, so obviously I wanted to work at Valve when I grew up. Their employees were creative and technical geniuses who made bank. The leaked employee handbook made me want it even more. These people had free-rolling workstations, and if you wanted to work with someone else on a project, all you had to do was roll your desks together! The concept of a game development company with no dedicated departments or management was mind-blowing, and they weren't just pumping out instant GOTY material, they were also running the largest digital game distribution service in the world at the same time! This place must be Heaven on Earth!


2022

Valve Software is not Heaven on Earth. I probably don't need to tell you that. If you're reading this, you're most likely someone who, like me, watched and waited as Valve went from Orange Box to ♥♥♥♥♥♥' black-box. 2011: Portal 2. Great follow-up, if a little too easy in parts. 2012: CSGO. I don't really play it, but I've...heard it's good...? 2013: Dota 2. Oh no, I thought. Oh dear God, no. Anything but that. Just as I feared, Dota 2 hit the ground sprinting and immediately became Valve's Big Thing That Isn't Steam. That was it. They kept TF2 going for way, waaaaay longer than I expected them to, and CSGO's weapon skin loot-box gacha...thing is keeping it running too, but that was it. They experimented with hardware and game-streaming apps/devices, but nothing groundbreaking.

That's when a few of the company's many desk-cliques started working with virtual reality technology.

You should read The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx if you have any interest in video game development, even if you couldn't care less about the HL series or VR headsets or anything like that, because it isn't really a story about Half-Life: Alyx. It's a 15-year-long story about a legendary game development studio in the mother of all mid-life crises, learning hard the benefits and consequences of a revolutionary new corporate structure, and the death and unlikely rebirth of the series you downloaded Steam to play in the first place.