Comment on What's up with Epic Games?

• MudMan@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  That's a hilarious thought. Valve is primarily an online storefront company that runs organized sales events multiple times a year. Their marketing arm is ruthlessly efficient. They invented maybe half of the GaaS strategies in the books and are arguably still one of the best at deploying them.

  And they do have at lest one more vector of PR. Normally you'd think third party relations is a different category, because it's a business-to-business thing, but when you get as big as Steam and have effectively removed or crowdsourced all greenlinghting and discovery you're in a different space. Like Unity, Valve has a small ninja army of dev relations guys they send around the world to events and gatherings to deliver the good word of our lord Valve and ensure that indie devs know what they're supposed to be doing to fit within their strategy. I assure you you haven't heard more refined PR-speak in your life.

  But again, they're amazing at being quiet and keeping up that image of "just a buncha engineer underdogs in a room fixing the games industry, ya know?" I don't hate them, or even dislike them. I don't hate any game publisher. Games are games, it's an entertainment industry, it doesn't warrant love or hate of companies or corporations, beyond the larger questions of how copyright and IP work in an online world. But this idea that Valve is a magic wonderland with no agency on how their image is handled or moneymaking strategy or community management is... a lot.

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  • Hajotay@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Valve is primarily an online storefront company that runs organized sales events multiple times a year. Their marketing arm is ruthlessly efficient.

    "Their marketing arm?" So... Kaci? The person they hired about a couple years ago to film silly minute-long YouTube videos about 5 times a year? Yeah she's really ruthless...

    Just look at the guys they send out to do Steam Deck interviews and tell me Valve has PR people working for them full-time. No offense to Pierre-Loup Griffais but there's a reason companies hire good-looking celebrities to push their products.

    Valve has a small ninja army of dev relations guys they send around the world to events and gatherings to deliver the good word of our lord Valve and ensure that indie devs know what they're supposed to be doing to fit within their strategy.

    jfc lmao does this "ninja army" sneak some shurikens pass the TSA so they can take out employees of rival PC gaming stores!? This doesn't even sound remotely nefarious, just sounds like Valve sends out some guys to consult companies on how best to use their products and do a little salesmanship and networking. The horror.

    But this idea that Valve is a magic wonderland with no agency on how their image is handled or moneymaking strategy or community management is... a lot.

    So give me some proof of Valve's "ruthless" marketing arm then? So far most you can say regarding Valve's "image handling" is that Valve sends some devs out to talk up Steam to developers. Meanwhile, most companies spend BILLIONS UPON BILLIONS on marketing and PR. Can you not see the insane difference between these?

    We already know a little how Valve works (here's an old employee manual). Note the line "There are not different sets of rules or criteria for engineers, artists, animators, and accountants." So yes, even Valve's marketing team (which so far as we know consists of one person) has a flat structure. So it's a little hard to see without any sort of management apparatus how "Valve" (as a whole) makes any concerted efforts towards these things.

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    • MudMan@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Hey! Somebody brought up the "leaked" employee manual, I think I have bingo now.

      The guys they have doing dev relations aren't engineers, they're dev relations people. They're talking business, not development.

      And just so I'm clear on how you think this works. You believe that Valve sets up what? Five sales a year? Plus the International. Plus coordinating and financing the CS Majors. Plus actually negotiating all the distribution deals for store placement with third parties. Plus shipping multiple hardware and software products, including setting up preview events and sending out review samples. Plus all the press relations for both games and press queries...

      ...with zero sales/PR/community management staff.

      Am I getting that wrong?

      Man, messed up as it is to refuse to put proper credits in games, you certainly see how that feeds into their, again, very carefully curated public image.

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      • Hajotay@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        I'm making a best effort guess based on the evidence to understand how the company works but yes, you can't prove one way or another. All I can really say is

        • Valve's website doesn't average any position related to PR, marketing or community relations
        • I've never seen a marketing position advertised on glassdoor for Valve
        • Valve's public-facing communication is legendarily poor, almost entirely buried in patch notes

        So I'm just putting 2 and 2 together here. If Valve actually has a community relations team, please God let me work there because that must be the easiest job on Earth.

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