While Valve company releases some of the best games ever, they are also known for long development cycles and delays. One may ask, “Why is this so?” Well, it is because Valve “eschews top-down management in favor of team-driven initiative,” Gamasutra.com wrote. They have also sped up game releases from one game once in a while, to one game released per year. Of course, this include the successful “Left 4 Dead” franchise.
Valve’s writer Chet Faliszek is currently working on “Left 4 Dead’s” DLC “The Passing”.
In an interview with Gamasutra.com , he said, “The structure of our company [means] we’re really autonomous, and if there are enough people who want to do something, we do it. We wanted to do Left 4 Dead 2. It’s not [marketing director] Doug [Lombardi] or [president] Gabe [Newell] or [COO] Scott Lynch sitting on top saying, ‘This is what we must do.’”
“It lets us make the choices more,” Faliszek added. “Our payoff for being able to do Left 4 Dead 2 so quickly really was about how passionate the team was about doing it, and how we had a singular goal and vision — this shared vision. That team was assembled by essentially looking around [the company] for people and talking with them. ‘What would you want to do in that world? How would you want to go?’ and finding that everybody was just focused. If you have that, you can work really fast and be really focused about it. [Lead designer] Tom Leonard was really the one who said, ‘We can do this in a year. I want to try this structured scheduling we don’t normally do.’”
In the end it was a positive payoff.
Faliszek did acknowledge that anything could have gone wrong. “We don’t really talk about that, but there were three different times when we could have pulled the plug on Left 4 Dead 2, and we said, ‘No.’ That was iteration hitting all the points right. Every time we hit a mark, we were better off than we thought we would be.”
Gamasutra.com wrote, “That same self-guiding principle has applied to the downloadable content strategy for all of Valve’s games. The Passing, set to release for Left 4 Dead 2 on PC and Xbox 360 next month, tells the story of a meeting between the four survivors of Left 4 Dead 2 and their counterparts from Left 4 Dead. Valve plans to follow that up a month later with DLC for the original game, which further fleshes out how the original survivors made it to the Southern locales of L4D2.”
Faliszek said, “To us, the game’s not done ever — and we’re given that leeway. I really love the Left 4 Dead world, and I want to [stay] in the Left 4 Dead world. We get to extend that out. Last year, we updated Counter-Strike: Source because someone at Valve was interested in doing that. We really like the games and the worlds we stay in, and we want to keep expanding out. There’s whole mapped-out stuff for Left 4 Dead 2 that we want to still go into, so we’re not done yet.”
Faliszek explained the reason for their company’s long development cycles and delays:
“The company works the way it works now because those guys never left. They may have had some problems then, and they learned from that. They help us newer guys — I’ve been there for five years, but I still feel like a new guy — get better and work better and think of things in a better way. People don’t normally leave Valve; so having that continuity really helps us learn and helps us understand what we’re doing.”
