I get the sarcasm, but Gaben said that is exactly why. Nobody came forward with some great idea to make the game really good, so they never started it, and instead worked on things like Portal 2.
So isn't this a fairly huge flaw showing up in this management style, if the cats can't even herd themselves well enough to produce a long-promised sequel to the company's biggest franchise?
It doesn't matter that much, of course, if Valve never finishes the Half Life series; they'll no doubt continue to make other projects which rake in the bucks. But for most companies you can't just abandon a cash-cow project like that. What would happen to Toyota if all the engineers decided they really wanted to work on sports cars and nobody could be bothered to work on the next iteration of the Camry? What happens if all the employees for the water company decide to design a new dam and nobody stays on the maintenance team to stop the existing dam from bursting?
It's inspiring that a company has the courage to let a franchise rest when it has artistically run its course (you need only to look to Hollywood for infinite counter-examples to this -- see http://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/lists/2009/10/-worst-sequ... ). The fact that Valve can still be successful, even without pressuring their employees to develop more "sure thing" games (read: sequels) is pretty awesome if you ask me (I say this as a long-time HL fan).
But as long as Valve is making enough money, the employees can work on whatever they want and Gabe won't care.
This is why many of the "unsexy" parts of Valve are in utter disarray. The Steam chat network and steamcommunity.com goes down at least once a week. And their security isn't very good. They lost credit card information earlier this year and they think encrypting your password with Javascript RSA ontop of SSL is going to help.
So isn't this a fairly huge flaw showing up in this management style, if the cats can't even herd themselves well enough to produce a long-promised sequel to the company's biggest franchise?
I'm struggling to see why producing a chain a hit games and making the company millions and millions of $ in the process instead of working on a sequel that the developers didn't have a strong vision for is a flaw personally.
Sounds like the system is working. When and if some of the developers stand up and say, "you know this is how HL3 should be" and convince the others to follow them, then we'll get HL3.
This is a huge flaw, but it is even more common to have the opposite huge flaw, that is, to only do the safe cash-cow things, which has killed many big companies. I believe that this is the core problem of any business with hit-miss dynamics, huge gains for single hits, (small) losses for every miss. Once you get a hit you can often monetize it for quite a while, like Disney does with all the stuff they sell related to the movies.
The dilemma in other words is: If you don't have a hit, it is hard to create one. Once you have a hit, it is easy to monetize, but will not last forever. In other words you need to both milk the cash-cow and produce new hits. It seems Valve is doing the latter excellently, but maybe they should build a separate organization for doing the former, since their inner workings is not optimal for that. Milking the cash-cow is often much less demanding, and more tolerant to mismanagement, so it should be a prime candidate for outsourcing.
