It's pretty weird and sad. Especially, Director of Business Development, Jason Holtman. Makes me wonder if it isn't one of those greedy business ploys. Where now Valve will turn into EA.

update from Gabe Newell:

"We don’t usually talk about personnel matters for a number of reasons. There seems to be an unusual amount of speculation about some recent changes here, so I thought I’d take the unusual step* of addressing them.

No, we aren’t cancelling any projects. No, we aren’t changing any priorities or projects we’ve been discussing. No, this isn’t about Steam or Linux or hardware or [insert game name here]. We’re not going to discuss why anyone in particular is or isn’t working here."

Perhaps corporate spying or something sinister like that?

I hope the released employees go to places that could use their talents.

Why do people find this as bad news? maybe those 25 employees had finished their work on some project, maybe the "Steambox" ? or a game? or some project, that they agreed to make and then leave? , its normal for a company to sever their employees from them after they finished their missions and obligations, why sit them with nothing to do?

as it says "Hardware engineer" , hardware engineers work on obviously hardware, so there is no need for them post developement of the hardware, its like i said either the 3D glasses that they worked on earlier or the "Steambox"


By the way I said this on that article you linked, and I got red thumbs, why are people so dumb?

I was rushed for time. Yes I'll expand on that.

Valve has very much deprioritised developing their own content. Their recent game (CSS) has nothing of the hype of Half-Life, TF2, L4D or Portal. Dota 2 is an unknown quantity for revenue since it's F2P and the bought components aren't essential to gameplay (like LoL) and aren't after it already made back its money (TF).

The things that Gabe speaks about for the future are non-game tools (Steam social features, Source film-maker, non game software via Steam), Big Picture mode and the Steambox platform. We are seeing a shift towards being a platform and general software company. Thus their condition isn't the same as the third party publishers whose fate is really in question at the moment. As long as PC gaming in general exists, even just indie games or as older titles continue, they will survive.

Most companies are having lay offs, it's not a state of the industry, more a state of the global economy.

And then that could be another topic.  It is said that "good people are hard to find" or whatever.  It had been you laid off because you ended up needing to cut costs because economic growth wasn't there.  It was a sign of your company being sick.  And now you see Valve going that there is nothing wrong at all here, and things are just fine: "no comment".  

That doesn't automatically mean they weren't laid off for economic reasons, if other employees could take up the slack and cover the work no longer dont by the laid off employees then as a company, there is no effect to production other than saving money, would you say saving money was 'wrong' ?, sure a little crude/mean but not wrong.

Now consider being the employer, paying 10 people the same amount to do a job, they do it but arent working flat out, sometimes they mess about or slack off a little here and there - if you get rid of 3 of those people, you're saving the wage, and the remaining staff need to up the ante to keep the flow of work going, so less slacking off, less mucking about, end result you aren't paying your employees to check their emails and sit on facebook.

Has nothing to do with Valve struggling.  Like, at all.  They're one of the most profitable companies in the world.  A couple of years ago they were making more money per employee than either Apple or Google and I doubt a lot has changed.

This was almost certainly because they were moving away from certain projects and no longer needed certain employees.  Since most of those released were on hardware projects, a lot of speculation is that some of those roles will be filled by outsourcing to hardware dedicated companies.  I think Gabe has also spoken in the past about keeping staff quality exceedingly high.  Supposedly he said during a recent speech that, because of Valve's management structure, they needed to be aggressive about firing people.  

Long story short, they probably just didn't need them anymore.