Backstepper: spider323 wants to know: What did you learn from the early release of Left-4-Dead 2? I mean, it was the fastest sequel you ever released.
Newell: I think it was interesting. I mean, I dont how much inside baseball people want to know. But for us, there was sort of this argument internally about a couple of different things. So Tom Leonard, who led the L4D2 project, said that it would be useful for the company as a whole to be able to prove that we could ship a product on time, or rather than constraining resources or rather than constraining quality that we constrained time. He proved that we could ship a product on a very specific schedule. Its not something were necessarily going to do very often. Its good to know that we can do it, and that there were a bunch of lessons we learned about how do you do Triage, how do you think about quality, how do you think about features. That was all really useful from a development perspective. So people who have worked in development situations know what Im talking about, about the organizational lessons you have to learn in order to do something that way. I also think it was interesting to me personally to realize how much angst it caused the community when we did do that, and that surprised me and Im sort of annoyed with myself that I was surprised because it would have been easier to do a better job than we did at talking about that initially to customers. It really was very much like, Look, were going to do something in a year. And it was very much, Oh my God, theyre only taking a year to do something. And it was that second reaction that we were ill-prepared for and it was stupid, really on my part than anybodys elses, not to anticipate that and to do a better job of explaining what was going on. Were not going to do that very often. Its nice to know we can do it. Nobodys like, oh, lets ship a new L4D every year until the end of time.
Johnson: Theres some unique factors there too that
Newell: There were a group of people who really wanted to do it which surprised me.
Johnson: Yes! Thats the tiebreaker. Internally, on anything, the people that are going to do the work want to do the work, then no ones going to get in their way.
Newell: I thought everybody was sick and tired of L4D after we shipped it. I thought it would be like two or three years before we would go back and do anything major in that space. Instead, they were like, we want to go into crunch mode next week!. Its like, Oh my God!.
Johnson: Are you sure? Yes? Okay. (laughs)
Newell: Are you sure? Can I talk you out of that? One thing that may or may not be obvious to people from the outside is that a lot of our decisions internally are heavily affected by people's interest and excitement in working on it. And its not because were self-indulgent employers. Its that theres a huge amount of information encoded in that kind of voting. So essentially creating a marketplace internally for ways that people can invest their time. The biggest danger for the company is that any one person starts making decisions for everybody else. Because even super-genius Gabe is full of hideously bad ideas.
The easiest way for us to know Ive had yet another really bad idea is that no one wants to work on it. When a bunch of people really want to work on something theres probably going to be a lot of value. The PS3 for Portal 2 really came out of that. I mean, we were right at the sort of tipping point of do we, or dont we? I personally was really excited to work with Sony to get Steam running on the PS3 because I think theres a lot of benefits to us and a lot of benefits to our partners if we do that. But the tipping point was that guys like Vapally and Sergay totally wanted to work on the PS3 again because theyd worked on it before they came to Valve. So that was the thing that made it easy to make the decision. I dont know if that marketplace of where you spend your time has really been discussed at Valve in the past and the public but it really influences a huge amount of our decision-making.
Johnson: If you want to know how project's are doing at Valve you ask people, are you having fun? And are you having fun means a whole bunch of things and its different for different people.
Newell: And its a term of art inside of Valve.
Johnson: Yeah, I mean, are you having fun could mean that youre working like crazy but thats what you think is the right thing to do. Fun for people here usually means the time Im spending right now feels like its the right thing to do.
