CS:GO Developer Explains Why Valve Rarely Communicates With the Community

A constant complaint that the CS:GO community has always expressed is no free-flowing communication between them and Valve. This has become a huge concern in the last few months as CS:GO got struck with multiple major problems, to which the developers had little to no response. With this problem being discussed more than ever before and the community members showing extreme disappointment with Valve, the developers have come forward with an explanation from their side. In a recent video titled ‘Let Updates Do The Talking’, Gautam Babbar - CS:GO Developer, has come forward to explain why Valve communicates so rarely with the community members, and how they go about solving various problems with the game.

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Why Valve Rarely Communicates With CS:GO Players?

Gautam who has been a CS:GO Developer with Valve for the last 9 years came forward to explain why they interact with the community so rarely. Right off the bat, he made it clear that Valve likes to communicate “through game updates” when it comes to CS:GO. Talking about Valve’s communication strategy he goes on to say that, 

“We think CS:GO is better when we get clear, unfiltered customer feedback. We read and analyze what our customers’ posts on various online communities. But as they know, we rarely participate in those conversations.

When we participate they stop talking to each other and they start talking to us, and the feedback becomes less clear. Occasionally, we weigh in if they seem blocked or we need some more information. But otherwise, we just stay out of it.”

Most of the times when the community want to talk with Valve, it is because of a problem that they might be facing with the game. Gautam says that the best possible solution here is to fix the issue and “update the game as soon as possible”. Talking about why Valve avoids talking about its future plans or how they intend to fix a particular bug is because,

“Future plans can always change. A bug might require more work than we expected or a fix may have unexpected consequences. Also, when we make these promises about the future,  customers start thinking about the game’s future, and not how it is now.

So we tend to think about the communication strategies we would use during those challenging times. In those times, we don’t think we can make customers happy just by talking to them, we would have to ship them updates and fix the issues.”

Following the strategy explained above, Gautam says that Valve keeps customer feedback clear, avoiding the pitfall of promises, and keeping itself in a better position to stay flexible, which in turn is a better way to go forward in the long run.

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What Gautam talks about above is actually being preached by Valve as seen in the recent ‘Trust Factor’ issue. The developers observed the CS:GO community talk about this problem for weeks, but did not comment at that point in time. Instead they started identifying the problem from their end, quickly working on a fix. Finally coming forward with a public statement from their end after everything had been patched.

Valve might be following the mantra “bad communication is worse than none,” because not doing so will bottleneck them and put them on the spot in certain situations as explained in detail above. But just being a silent spectator without even giving a hint of what they have planned or are thinking about, is it the right way to go ahead?

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