Valve fires and calls man ass but turns out to be the ass
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over 2 years ago by Jason Magee
Now, just to note I don’t overly follow pro e-sports and so am not overly aware of the history in this story.
This appeared to start when Gabe Newell, co-founder and managing director of Valve posted the following unprofessional rant Reddit regarding the Shanghai Major.
James Harding, who is known as 2GD, was the current host of the Shanghai Major replied on Reddit sometime later with a lengthy Google document explaining his position. The Shanghai Major is the second event of Valve’s ‘Dawn of the Ancients Major Championships’, which is basically a tournament for Dawn of the Ancients 2 (DOTA2) a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA).
What I’ve taken from the situation is…
- Gabe doesn’t actually know James which makes calling him an ass unfair
- Valve, a multi billion dollar company, think it’s okay not to pay people properly. James had to petition them to do so.
- Valve appear to keep their deliberate flat organisation structure when organising events leading to a bit of a cluster-fuck and poor planning
- From watching a few videos, James comes across a bit annoying. This might not be fair as I find all e-sports events to be annoying and very cringe-worthy; not because I don’t like e-sports but because of how the events are done (unprofessionally? over-the-top? not sure of the best way to describe it).
- Generally, the community feel is that James is a good guy and Valve have messed up
I’m mostly disappointed to see Valve trying to get away with not paying people, it’s outright disgusting to see big money organisations try and pull this. I’m also not surprised by their lack of planning and organisation, you can see this in all Valve’s activities, particularly their Steam support which is renowned for being awful (didn’t Valve promise to fix this over a year ago?).
Interesting, community support has not been on Valve’s side which appears to be becoming more of a trend as Valve continue to let the community down. Valve have always been viewed very fondly, perhaps too fondly by gamers. With EA and Ubisoft now actually trying to turn their image round, could we see a shift in the future?