VR is not a "gimmick", it's a new medium.
I apologise if I came across wrong. I'm not saying gimmick in a negative sense. I was lost for a better word to describe an eye catching new approach that the game is build around. that the game exists to demonstrate. I agree VR is quite possible the endgame for first person immersion in games, and I am eagerly anticipating HL Alyx for this reason.
HL:A is not an "experiment", it's a full-scale game.
Nobody IMO is questioning that HL: Alyx is likely going to be an absolutely fantastic game that pushes the medium forward. (Concerns about teleportation movement aside.) But it only exists to push VR, and Valve are explicit about that.
Huh? How the hell can you claim that? Are you saying that the people who used to work on it and chose to work on something different now are lying? Why do you seemingly consider it impossible that most people who worked on the game would rather work on e.g. HL:A? I mean, I'm in the industry, and if I had that opportunity and no other constraints I'd drop what I'm doing and jump on it.
Because the notion that an entire team chose to abandon their highly celebrated and highly anticipated game to work on DOTA is silly. I don't buy that the entire team voluntarily abandoned their beloved game. It's as silly as believing that all the people working on Half-Life 2: Episode 3 chose to go make hats in Team Fortress. We know about Valve's behind the scenes drama. Drama that caused key series developers to leave Valve in frustration and publicly voice that they couldn't make the games they wanted to make. We have testimonials about how things work at Valve. About how the flat structure hurts projects that aren't favored by invisible cliques.
Valve's development culture does not allow unpopular projects to get funding and development support. Valve doesn't do Ecco the Dolphins of game dev. Everything gravitates towards the popular projects. Now this happens at other companies. But at other companies, you don't work on a game and have everyone leave around you, with no avenue to replace them.
By that token, all of the R* studios are nothing but support teams for North and San Diego
Rockstar has historically been regarded as one of the most soul crushing nightmarish companies in the entire games industry to work at. It's a company that fired people for trying to fix Red Dead Redemption 2's combat. For all their faults, Valve are like the polar opposite of that. Valve's culture sabotages long haul game development (I used the phrase long haul earlier, and its meaning should be obvious), but it is wonderful for the health, and peace of mind of the developers who work there. You don't hear stories about Valve employees getting fired for displaying basic creativity.
and all of the Ubisoft studios around the globe are forced to deliver yearly iterations of AC and FC.
Far Cry isn't annual. Regardless, the official stance from Ubisoft is that they have had problems with Splinter Cell because their hires want to work on Assassin's Creed and Far Cry and series like that. But the difference is that if Ubisoft really want to make Splinter Cell they can do it. They hire people and they deliver a product. Ubisoft is making a VR Splinter Cell game for Oculus right now. They are also rumoured to be working on the next mainline Splinter Cell, with a reveal in 2020. This is the benefit of being able to form teams that don't disintegrate on a whim. Valve has a clear problem with team cohesion. "The desks have wheels" sounds great in theory, and I love the idea of developers being free to move around.
In fact, I think that the AAA games industry has a massive problem where it treats people as cogs. Instead of letting them try their hand at things they might enjoy, they do one job. And then they get put on hold at the end of dev.
The idea of teams naturally forming and roles emerging from skills in a similar manner to academia like Durante said is actually fantastic.
HOWEVER it means that people move on to work on fun stuff instead of slogging away because it's their job. This is what happened to various Valve projects. Projects get cancelled at companies like Ubisoft. Remember Jade Raymond and Ubi Toronto? They were founded to make Splinter Cell games. It all went off the rails. But people didn't wake up one day and discover that the Splinter Cell team was making hats for Far Cry because they'd gotten bored with Splinter Cell because it's not sexy and exciting like Far Cry's microtransaction hats.
People who wanted to work on traditional singleplayer games at Valve were alienated for years. They tried to form teams, and the teams disintegrated. Valve's culture was not conducive to them. The only way the new Half-Life has been able to get off the ground is by piggybacking on a VR experimental project Valve had going.
Campo Santo should have seen this coming. Valve do not make usually games like Firewatch .A game like Firewatch would IMHO peter out inside Valve, just as Valley of Gods has. Some might disagree, but think about it. It doesn't have the gimmick or hook or whatever you want to call it to coalesce a team and hopefully keep them interested long enough to ship. This is a recurring pattern we have watched for over a decade.
Valve's structure is absolutely fantastic for small scale experimentation. Rapid iteration. Live services. Valve's internal structure is why Steam is a better launcher than its competitors. Valve's culture overall is far healthier than most of their contemporaries. Valve's immense money pool allows them to pursue technological advancement and gaming-adjacent projects such as Proton. But it has proven deeply problematic for developing traditional videogames. They didn't cancel HL Episode 3 because they were perfectionists or anything romantic like that. They fell apart internally. They became a magpie chasing the shiny things around. Even though HL Alyx looks potentially mindblowing, the circumstances of its creation are reflective of systemic problems. And this includes Laidlaw's departure in 2016. Valve were the first major developer to jump on the F2P MP game bandwagon with TF2 and Dota and eventually CS GO and so on. And it caused issues within the company. It causes issues within most companies that go down that road.