Employee-treatment Memes

You know you're living in a dystopian tech world when praising literally everyone on the team gets you a standing ovation. Gaben and Valve have somehow cracked the code: treat your employees like humans, let them work on what they want, ship games when they're ready (Half-Life 3 notwithstanding), and don't crunch people into the ground. Meanwhile, the rest of the industry is out here with mandatory 80-hour weeks, layoffs after record profits, and CEOs taking home bonuses that could fund an indie studio for a decade. The bar is literally on the floor, and Valve just casually stepped over it while everyone else is doing limbo underneath. Support staff getting recognition? Revolutionary. Not treating devs like disposable code monkeys? Groundbreaking. It's wild that basic human decency in game dev is now considered a flex.