take a minute to look up the various "I was inside Valve and it had a hidden structure" war stories. that led to a lot of people reading "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" back in the day.

TLDR: "Welcome To Flatland" is Valve marketing and it doesn't hurt to take it with a grain of salt.

https://www.pcgamer.com/valves-flat-structure-contains-hidde...

https://medium.com/dunia-media/the-nightmare-of-valves-self-...

https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

Important to note that Gabe gave the product rights that the fired team were developing. Said team went on to have a successful Kickstarter (250% successful!), and then failed in actually delivering results.

In hindsight, seems smart to pull the plug so far in advance.

I'm sure the complaints about informal power groups, careful politicking being required and gaurded groups are true... if only because that's true in every office I've worked in.

> In hindsight, seems smart to pull the plug so far in advance.

Not knowing the product, this looks like it may be a valid interpretation; could another be that the project would be more likely to succeed with the commercial backing of a company like Valve?

Absolutely, let me walk back my language so that its clear I'm extrapolating from very limited data.

Edit: I can't edit it anymore. Was going to change it to "Based on this limited insight, it may have been the best option for both parties to part ways given the project teams complaints and valves lack of interest in the product"

"I finally discovered who my boss was when she fired me."

Surely that proves that it is decentralized; like so many decentralized services before it (IRC, email) the lack of the lack of formal structure meant that its structure was emergent instead (freenode, gmail).