Valve? You mean the guys who come up with revolutionary titles that are so good, people can't stop whining about the next installment and they still keep working until it reaches legendary status before releasing it? Methinks those guys are doing it pretty well :lol: But yeah. Gold stars and pizza can certainly motivate adults. Many adults pretend to be too old for that stuff, but anyone who works with videogames stays a child at heart!
The people who are over five years late with a project and takes even longer to do minor patches? The people who have never released ANYTHING on time ever? Yeah they could use help. Valve are a bunch of amateurs and I think their games are vastly overrated.
That's a false premise because Valve's games don't get any better from being delayed. They just take longer to do the same thing. Better devs can release better games in a third the time. The only Valve game that has benefitted from a delay was HL1. And this is because the reason for delaying it is fundamentally different, it wasn't good enough so they put in extra effort. What they do now is just wallow in their own incompetence and using the excuse "when it's done" to justify it. Meanwhile Uber is steamrolling through their own development schedule. Why would they need motivation? They clearly already have it.
i dont see what premise youre referring to - if you mean its a false dichotomy sure that's possible but the reality is most experienced devs move on to bigger and brighter things e.g. their own venture (Uber is an example of this). the teams that made most of blizzard's great games are all part of different companies now. the lead dev of starcraft is in charge of guild wars now iirc. when a company with a reputation for solid games releases garbage its clear something didn't go right in development and development is a function of time. i'm also not sure how u can claim to have an insider knowledge on the valve development process.
Diablo 3 took an unreasonable amount of time to develop also, that didn't make it a better product either. Time is important but only to a degree. Getting things done in that time is far more important. The ultimate example would be DNF. All the time in the world, literally, and it turns out fairly mediocre.
idk the first time they tried to make diablo 3 they scrapped it and turned it into WoW WoW turned out alright for them i guess, im not rly into cartoon rpgs tho.
