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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35893 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Economists realized a long time ago that models used for competition between firms don't work to model behavior within firms, and almost nobody in a firm is actually working with the goal of "make the most money for the firm".

In other words, institutions are principal-agent problems all the way down.

Yes, although you would expect the most successful firms (like Amazon) to be one ones that have done the best to mitigate principal-agent problems.

It's likely that the kinds of problems that principal-agent incentive mismatches cause can pop up very quickly once the system, whatever it was, holding it back fails. It can even be as simple as a culture change within a rapidly growing department, as it goes from being a dozen people who believe in what they're doing to a few hundred people who are there for a paycheck and career advancement.

Or, like Google and Valve, luck into a monopoly they can extract rents from while their business is still small, agile, and focused. Then use that firehose of money to paper over their bloat and institutional decay.

What does of institutional decay does Valve have?

Internal reports say they have three major problems, but for some reason the reports only finished describing two of them.

Tyler McVicker could tell you a whole lot about that, but to keep it short:

-Valve's employees are elegible for end-of-the-year bonuses conditional on peer review and/or performance. This ends up creating a status competition within the company, and old-timers may get a bit of bias in their direction. The work culture in general is not as healthy as it would seem, though it's worth noting that it probably is still way better than some other game companies that gained infamy for crunching.

-Much like Google, there is an incentive for starting new projects, but not necessarily finishing them, let alone supporting older titles (for years, Team Fortress 2 has been on life support, with content continuing to be injected into the game alongside the occasional bugfix, all thanks to the work of a mere 1-3 developers. That said, there's still one guy still updating the GoldSrc engine, it seems). Many potential games were started and canned between the releases of Dota 2 and Half-Life: Alyx for reasons such as these.

-The flat structure Valve was once lauded for may be contributing to the lack of new titles, as the "rolling desk" system makes it hard to actually pull people together for a project and keep them together.

-Too many ideas and directions could also be another thing. Valve was supposed to be doing more stuff with the SDK for HL: Alyx, but then they jumped full-steam-ahead with the Steam Deck, which has also tempered expectations for new VR hardware (Valve really could do with a new version of the Index to compete with the Quest 2) or a potential new Steam Controller, or the "Citadel" game that Tyler has been reporting on for a couple of years now.

-Much like Google, there is an incentive for starting new projects, but not necessarily finishing them,

I don't think this is a problem at Google. Google actually has rather strong focus on launching things, and the promo process strongly incentivizes it. The issue is rather with maintaining it post-launch. The typical story is that you get the project to launch, stay for a quarter or two to bask in the glory, and then move on to fresher, greener pastures.

Mostly the "games company unable to produce a videogame they didn't buy ready-made from an outside developer" kind.

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