I think you and a few others are selling Valve and the article a little short. Varoufakis does give a precise definition of what he means by non-hierarchical: free allocation of individual time. How is that not a radical innovation? Nearly every other corporation is a tyranny by comparison. And it's not just that they happened to hire people who work this way. It was clearly a conscious design decision and probably couldn't have gotten started any other way.

(BTW, I don't think you can have an "informal and spontaneous" hierarchy, or a "flat" one. Those are oxymorons. Hierarchy by definition is a formal gradation of ranks. No?)

Varoufakis is careful to distinguish this management structure from Valve's ownership structure, which is hierarchical. Many people have pointed out that ultimately there has to be a boss at Valve: the owner. He implies this too when he points out that its management structure depends on the "enlightenment" of the owners "not using their property rights to boss people around". So yes, whatever this experiment is, it isn't communism. That doesn't mean it isn't radical! I think we're hypnotized a bit by having been raised with "capitalism" and "communism" as the only two poles of a binary system, where communism was an obvious failure so therefore the status quo is the only possibility... (not implying that this is your view, just that it's in our water). Besides which it's not obvious that Valve's structure is anti-capitalist. The way Varoufakis describes it, it's an extension and generalization of capitalism: extension because market dynamics are being applied to what has traditionally been monolithic bureaucracy; generalization because something other than price – namely, time – is being used inside Valve to signal value. (Anti-corporatist, sure. And yay! But I digress.)

Ownership must have an impact on how the company functions, so there are unanswered questions here. But let's not naively assume that ownership trumps everything. Suppose the owners decided tomorrow, "We tire of this experiment. The experiment is hereby changed to neo-Stalinism." Would people at Valve glumly bow their heads and say, "oh, ok"? Likely not. Some would leave; others would resist. It's not clear what would happen. So yes, vertical ownership does imply power - but not absolute power, except perhaps to destroy the whole thing.

Seems to me the big unanswered questions are: (1) relation of ownership and management structures, (2) how hiring and firing really work. The latter is the most important use of management power, so it's the big test of how non-hierarchically Valve really operates. Especially firing. No matter how good their "filters for self-motivated people" are, they can't be perfect. When firing is necessary, how is it really done? A lot of people seem to be imagining that it must work like this: you get called into Gabe's office and Gabe says, "we're not that anarcho-syndicalist, you're fired." That would indeed be hierarchical. But we don't know this. And even if it were true, it wouldn't completely destroy the experiment.

I don't think their claims are quite as utopian as some of the more cynical/debunking commenters assume. Thinking about this as "utopia or not" makes it less interesting.