A decade ago, long before every media executive figured out that downloading was the future, Valve started an online service, Steam. It has since become for games what iTunes is to music — a huge online distributor, in its case one with more than 40 million active users and that, by some estimates, accounts for about 70 percent of the PC games bought and downloaded from the Web. Through Steam, Valve effectively collects a toll on other companies’ online game sales, in addition to making money from selling its own products.
Now Valve executives think they may be onto the next big thing in games: wearable computing. The goggles I’m wearing — reminiscent of the ones Google recently unveiled to much hoopla — could unlock new game-playing opportunities. This technology could let players lose themselves inside a virtual reality and, eventually, blend games with their views of the physical world.
Valve fosters unorthodox thinking through a corporate culture unusual even by the quirky standards of technology companies. While many start-ups pay lip service to flat organizational structures, Valve emphasizes that its workplace is truly “boss-less.”
“We don’t have any management, and nobody ‘reports to’ anybody else,” reads Valve’s handbook for new employees, which generated buzz this year when it leaked onto the Web.
To spur creativity, Google management created the concept of “20 percent time,” the portion of employees’ schedules that they could commit to entirely self-directed projects. At Valve, it’s more like 100 percent time. New employees aren’t even told where to work in the company. Instead, they are expected to decide on their own where they can contribute most. Many desks at Valve are on wheels. After figuring out what they want to do, workers simply push their desks over to the group they want to join.
Valve has an eclectic work force. The company became interested in hiring one artist only after learning that his pastime was spray-painting graffiti art in Britain. It recently hired Leslie Redd, a school administrator, to lead an effort to use “Portal” to teach physics and other subjects in schools by offering a more engaging way to present ideas like escape velocity. Ms. Redd said that more than 2,000 teachers worldwide had registered to use the game in classes.
This year, Mr. Newell hired Yanis Varoufakis, a Greek economist, after being impressed with Mr. Varoufakis’s personal blog, which he fills with commentary on the European financial crisis. Mr. Varoufakis, who had never heard of Valve and is not a gamer, is studying the workings of the virtual economies of Valve games, in which players can barter and sell items like hats and armor. He said he was drawn to the job partly by Valve’s “completely anti-authoritarian” culture that, to his surprise, seemed to be working.
Valve’s most striking recruiting campaign is a recent move to establish a hardware group to develop technologies that can enhance the playing of games. The company posted a job listing for an industrial designer, hinting that it planned to get into the computer business itself. “We’re frustrated by the lack of innovation in the computer hardware space, though, so we’re jumping in,” the listing read. “Even basic input, the keyboard and mouse, haven’t really changed in any meaningful way over the years.”
Valve can do without many formalities of a traditional company because it’s privately held and controlled by Mr. Newell. He and Mike Harrington, who is no longer with the company, founded Valve in 1996 with the wealth they accumulated in Microsoft’s early days. The company has never raised money from outside investors, so it is under no external pressure to sell itself or go public.