The Half-Life: Alyx development team was the largest Valve had ever put together for a single game project.
According to the latest issue of industry magazine Edge, “somewhere over 80” devs worked on Alyx at the end of production.
That’s double the size of the teams of around forty that developed Portal 2 and Half-Life 2.
While the absolute highest for Valve, 80 people is a relatively small figure for a 15-hour long AAA blockbuster. For reference, the Resident Evil 2 remake development teams was around 800 people.
Valve’s internal record might also to do with the company’s ‘flat hierarchy’ structure, which allows workers to freely move their desks to jump on board of whatever project they want.
This is exactly what happened in December 2019, when Valve ran a company-wide playtest. Following the test, new people just “wheeled their desks over” to work on aspects of the game that they thought needed improvement.