Public-facing Valve dev shows why most Valve devs don't have much to do with the public: 'I'm just the only one dumb enough to be on Twitter'
Valve operates as a slightly closed shop, rarely granting staff interviews and keeping community engagement to a minimum. The studio's latest game, Deadlock, was even released semi-covertly with no official confirmation until the cat was well and truly out of the bag (which may have been some inspired marketing). Valve people, generally speaking, keep their thoughts within Valve. So Valve engineer Fletcher Dunn is a brave soul: some might even say foolhardy.
Dunn is an extraordinarily overqualified man who, among other things, has co-authored a free book on 3D math in game development. His role at Valve seems focused on networking, and he's worked across the studio's titles even though the focus here is CS2. He also drops breadcrumbs in public which, to a community oft-starved of information, are seized upon with relish.
«I have some new network stuff that will be shipping in CS soon,» said Dunn with a smiley emoji on October 2, referring to the recent Armory update. His replies were immediately flooded by Counter-Strike players tremendously excited that a Valve dev was saying something, anything, about their beloved game: soon the talk turned to Operations, new maps, and all the exciting things Dunn was going to deliver.
«Oh crap this was a mistake,» Dunn posted shortly afterwards. «Don't get excited. I am only a tiny part of this great team.»
The problem is that no matter what Dunn says, and the vast majority of what he does talk about is networking issues, it is at best a «rare W» from Valve and at worst is some sort of implicit confirmation of Half-Life 3. It also makes him a bit of a target for the spittle-flecked mob who think harassing developers on social media is a sane pastime.
«Fix the game overpaid idiots dev,» says the perfectly named VoxPopuli490. «Hey idiot fix the subtick you c**t,» runs another healthy missive. Some of this stuff is hard to even parse: «You broken CS2 network loss packets for no reason and 2sec lags only in CS2.» Yeah Fletcher
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