Valve is basically a closed company, and you really don’t see many of their developers active on social media… but one of them is!

Valve can be described as a closed company, but they didn’t seem to tell Fletcher Dunn (we wrote about him the other day, helping ChatGPT implement the Deadlock matchmaking system). He sometimes drops a few tidbits about games being made inside the company, since he mostly deals with networking stuff. For example, he wrote about Counter-Strike 2 getting new networking stuff, but fans quickly changed the subject (maps, game modes…). Dunn admitted that this was a mistake and that the public shouldn’t get upset because he is only a small part of the team.

Sure, he’s gotten a lot of flak for one reason or another, but Dunn hasn’t gone off the deep end: “A rule of thumb I use is that if my first encounter with a random person on social media is that they are a snarky jerk, I assume the expected total value of all future interactions is negative and block them. It is possible to express negative feedback, criticism, or disagreement in a polite way.” And it’s hard to argue with that. You can criticize, but you have to do it in a constructive way.

A rule of thumb I use is that if my first encounter on social media with a random person is for them to be a snarky dickhead, I assume that the expected total value of all future interactions is negative, and block them.

— Fletcher Dunn (@ZPostFacto) October 3, 2024

I’m just the janitor TBH

— Fletcher Dunn (@ZPostFacto) September 23, 2021

In 2021, he helped the fans of Team Fortress 2. He fixed long-standing issues on community servers, and then he alluded to Valve’s comment (maintenance) and said that he was just the janitor. Some people told him that they didn’t know what Dunn did at Valve, but that he was the best person at Valve. He just said that it wasn’t a coincidence, he was the only one stupid enough to be on Twitter!

Dunn works mostly on Counter-Strike 2 and Deadlock, and it would be futile to get anything Half-Life 3 related out of him. He would just write “lol” and he has done that before.

Source: PCGamer