Kicking off the first day of the Develop in Brighton conference 2012, Valve's director of business development Jason Holtman took the topic 'Everyone's Business is Business'.

"Business is getting your content out into the world," he explained. "Business is not defined by skills."

Taking some examples of Valve's business, his point was that smart people will find new and smart ways to drive your business forward. You don't have to rely on 'experts' who aren't working directly on the games.

"We are essentially 'bossless'. We have flat structure with localised decision making," he said.

Soft launch

His first example was - How do you announce Portal 2?

Portal 2 was announced simply by adding content to Portal 1.

Each level in the game got a new radio and there was a forum post telling players to change the frequency of the radio. Each one contained various easter egg information about the new game.

The team also changed the last 15 seconds of the ending of Portal 1. The point was the new game wasn't announced by a formal press release, although there was one eventually.

"People went crazy. The forum thread got 2.7 million views and 12,000 people contributed content," Holtman explained.

"That's much better than putting an advert on the Chrysler building."

His point was this wasn't traditional marketing.

"It had to be bottom up and it had to be fun," he said. "Having everyone involved in the decision making made it fun."

Head to head

His second example was How do you distribute and produce content for Team Fortress 2?

"In the past, we would have just shipped the content, but the team wanted to make updates interesting," he said.

So Valve set up a 'war' between the Demoman and Soldier characters, with the character who got the most kills in Team Fortress 2 getting the content update.

"If the content team hadn't been involved in this activity, including things such as blogposts, it would have sucked," Holtman explained.

"The Team Fortress 2 team was better at marketing than a Team Fortress 2 marketing team would have been."

Crowd sourcing

The third example was How do you find and encourage good independent games?

"We had a problem of how do we filter the large number of new indie games out there and put the best ones on Steam," Holtman said.

"We also didn't have the ability to encourage people during development."

This was partly an issue of a lack of resources (the Steam team is around 10 people), and there wasn't enough information to tell which were the good games anyhow.

The result is Steam Greenlight, which is a community-based initiative to promote the most interesting in-development games.

"It provides fans and creates fandom. People will want to do this," Holtman explained.

"Business projects can start anywhere, but the solution involves everyone, including your customers and other third parties partners," he added.

Everyone's a winner

The result is you end up with a virtuous circle - keeping you closer to the customer and unifying your teams - creating better content and a better business.

Ending with some pointers in terms of how to do this, Holtman pointed to the benefits of physical proximity between staff and starting on small projects first.

"Our industry is very different from other industries. I think bossless companies work better," Holtman concluded.