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If you look at the requirements for just one piece, like art, from one generation of games to the next, it will change radically. You need people who are adaptable because the thing that makes you the best in the world in one generation of games is going to be totally useless in the next.
People who are constantly looking for the opportunity to do something new are also people who are not going to be helped by having job titles - job titles create expectations of specialization and focus which don't map really well to creating the best possible experience for your customers.
About half the people at Valve have run their own companies, so they always have the option not just to take a job at another game company, but to go start their own company. The question you always have to answer is, 'How are we making these people more valuable than they would be elsewhere?'
I remember back in the early days of Microsoft that from the day that you decided that you were just going to put out an ad to a customer - and all you were usually able to tell them was that a new product was available - it was about nine months before you could actually reach the first customer.
We tend to think of Steam as tools for content developers and tools for producers. We're just always thinking: how do we want to make content developers' lives better and users' lives a lot better? With Big Picture Mode, we're trying to answer the question: 'How can we maximize a content developers' investment?'
I think it's really clear that Sony lost track of what customers and what developers wanted. I'd say, even at this late date, they should just cancel it and do a do over. Just say, 'This was a horrible disaster and we're sorry and we're going to stop selling this and stop trying to convince people to develop for it'.
It used to be that you needed a $500-million-a-year company in order to reach a worldwide audience of consumers. Now, all you need is a Steam account. That changes a whole bunch of stuff. It's kind of a boring 'gee, information processing changes a stuff' story, but it's going to have an impact on every single company.
When I worked at Microsoft, I got to go and visit a bunch of different companies. Probably a hundred different companies a year. You'd see all the different ways they'd work. The guys who did Ventura Publisher one day, and then United Airlines the next. You'd see the 12 guys in Texas doing Doom, and then you'd go see Aetna life insurance.
In order for innovation to happen, a bunch of things that aren't happening on closed platforms need to occur. Valve wouldn't exist today without the PC, or Epic, or Zynga, or Google. They all wouldn't have existed without the openness of the platform. There's a strong tempation to close the platform, because they look at what they can accomplish when they limit the competitors' access to the platform, and they say 'That's really exciting.'