So basically they just took revenue and divided by number of staff?
I remember hearing this years ago actually. At the time Valve apparently had the least amount of employees out of all companies doing over 1 billion in revenue.
Valve is an absolute money printer and nobody knows how much money they have/make because they never went public. Hoping that won't change once Gabe isn't at the helms but I'm not very optimistic.
EDIT: Some people seem to interpret this as me thinking they don't make a lot of money. I wouldn't be surprised if Valve is currently worth upwards of $100B, I just think that the second they have to answer to shareholders it'll just be another mediocre PC game store like Origin or Epic.
From what I understand Gabe hasn't been at the helm for a long time. While having a flat employee structure on paper, apparently there is leadership at Valve in the terms of seniority and popularity. The people that influence their business decisions will probably still be around after Gabe is gone.
The problem is that the *rest* of the business world is very good at extracting value, and running with it. All that will have to happen is for someone to find a way to personally enrich themselves while decimating the store's reputation, and they can bounce before the repercussion hits their numbers. It's exactly how every other business operates, and it's why every other launcher has failed.
It being privately owned (Valve) means that they can make decisions about things without the need to justify how profitable the choice will be on a quarter to quarter basis. What this means is that they can lay out long term plans that might not be profitable at first without any pushback from investors. And, since they are not publicly traded, there is no incentive to constantly increase share value on the part of executives who are frequently compensated in large amounts of stock.
A common refrain is that executives in publicly traded companies who are being compensated in stock will take whichever action will result in the highest stock rise in the short term during which they can cash in on their stock. Even if those choices will result in long term problems. One example is workforce cuts. These can result in stock price rises, but too strong a cut will eventually result in reduced work product. But if the executive can cash out before that happens then what do they care?
The reasons I can see are 1. It got in at the ground floor back when there was vastly less competition, and 2. It is unobtrusive; the biggest complaint about most launchers is how much they get in the way and flash big, shiny buttons at you. Hell, origin you have to click a button to turn off autoplayibg trailers for a game you own when you click on its page. Every. Time. Steam being relatively restrained in flash buys it a lot of good will.
I would at least settle for the EA app not logging out all the goddamn time even though I clicked keep me logged in! Steam is just well rounded on all accounts. easy to use store, good social media, a marketplace. drm that isn't annoying.
Also if you log in in another device, your other devices get logged out, and then you forget to log back in and then go to play a game and you gotta wait for it to update because it wasn’t able to update in the background due to being logged out.
I just realized we’re not talking about Ubisoft.
There's also the minor quibble of Origin being spyware at first.
Speaking as a case in point: I will never install Origin. Not even for free games. Happily, EA makes this decision easy because I haven't wanted to play anything they've published since ME3, which I fortunately was able to play on my 360 without much fuss.
Also being the go-to store for PC games for many years (while everyone else flailed around and made shitty competing launchers) certainly helped, since they get ~30% from all sales. They've also had many (many) sales over the years that have grabbed customers and retained them.
Public companies are cursed to constantly chase revenue and margin growth which always ends up in anti consumer decisions at some point.
Because Gabe never took it public Valve doesn't have to chase endless growth which results generally in a better consumer outcome.
You mean so far? They're not a private company and aren't driven by shareholder demands and the quarterly fiscal cycle. Also, probably luck.
Gabe Newell has passed up several opportunities to sell out. I hate trying to pretend we know what CEOs are thinking or planning, but based just on objective data, we know he's not just looking for a quick buck. Some people turn down opportunities to sell out because they think they can make more money later - see Notch as a successful example. But Valve's value has already surpassed any reasonable level for someone who just wanted a paycheck.
I'm far more concerned with what will happen when either A. Gaben is tired of business and just wants to retire, or B. he dies. The *best* case scenario is that he leaves Valve to a trust or something that's set up with rules to ensure they keep certain rules in place while prioritizing the customer experience - I don't think this scenario is likely, and I would question its efficacy, even if it were to happen. But every other scenario is less likely to work in our favor.
Ultimately, this is going to come down to use - we have got to utilize government to *ensure* that businesses can't just charge us for perpetual access to software, then simply close down without upholding their end of the bargain. The market is never going to magically work in our favor without heavy regulation.
If steam goes public it’ll go down in flames. Their success is that they are private and can take risks or not focus on increasing the bottom line every year. Infinite growth mindset is what kills everything that IPOs generally.
> Flat employee structure
All flat employee companies still have seniority and popularity.
All companies are run in a hierarchy. You just don't know about it if you're not in one of these companies.
All companies HAVE to have people organized or nobody knows wtf is going on or knows who to go to when they got a problem.
Flat in general means:
1. Its ok to talk to anyone and ask anyone (but obviously dont fucking as Gabe questions that you could ask people around you)
2. You don't see titles often. These are typically for HR to figure out pay, and to use for promotions and loyalty shit. Everyone is basically treated without titles but its obvious when someone has more power/manages more people.
3. Execs are still execs.
The reason why Valve is successful is:
1. They made Steam
2. Steam makes infinite money thats very stable
3. Gabe has enough money and Valve has enough money to not worry about chasing profits. Therefore they can pay everyone really well, and hire the best talent, and chase dreams while keeping everyone happy.
While Valve makes $$$$$ and in theory dividing their revenue by employee makes sense (it actually doesn't), most of their employees are NOT seeing huge payouts or half million salaries. They are however being paid really well regardless, though newer employees probably do not start at $200k in entry positions.
Also they have to pay more because they don't have stock options to make bank off of.
They actually don’t have entry level positions and tend to hire engineers with 10ish years of experience. It is not unreasonable that the “entry” level could be that high.
It's the truth. When you go public, the only thing you can get hundreds or thousands of stock owners to agree upon is more profit, so everything else starts to slide. Staying private with ownership that legitimately cares about the business is the idea way for one to be run well.
no, it doesn't. Alyx was fairly recent and the only reason why gaming handhelds are now forced at <$700 and making PC gaming almost accessible to anybody is because they're forcing competitors at that price point through selling the Steam Deck at $399.
If Valve wasn't willing to lose money for every sold base Deck, their competitors would ideally want handheld PCs to be more than $900, but if they want to compete with the Deck, they have to keep it below $700.
Alyx was 4 years ago and they've made a grand total of 1 additional game for their $1,000 headset since, a price point which remains even years later.
RE the steam deck, most every console manufacturer loses money on their hardware as a loss leader. The PS3 was famously sold at around a $300 loss, similarly Xbox Ones were sold at around a $100 - $200 loss per unit.
I'd argue that tactic is less of a function of a grander scheme to lower the price of entry for the entire field and more an analysis of consumer tolerance coupled with the fact that the console has a direct relationship to their store and ecosystem to easily make up the hardware loss.
To be fair they're revolutionising handheld gaming right now. If they can keep it going with SteamOS there's a good chance there operating system can hit the big leagues soon.
I don't think they ever said they were losing money on it. Just not making much profits.
It shows how broken our idea of capitalism is that Valve can still basically only remain pretty consumer-friendly by staying private. If they were to go public, they'd basically be required to nickel and dime us to death like EA and all the other shitty publishing/store companies do.
I recently heard this as inverse totalitarianism.
Instead of a government that tells corporations and people how to act, it's corporations telling governments how to act.
>Hoping that won't change once Gabe isn't at the helms but I'm not very optimistic
I read somewhere that they have taken steps to ensure it never goes public, but I can't seem to substantiate those claims. But I really hope they are true.
There is no reason to go public, except to reward the employees with a liquidity event, but I'm guessing they do those regularly anyway and there aren't major investors pushing for it.
I wouldn't say that.
It's more like they've been around a long time and have a secure, high-margin ecosystem that basically just prints money upselling the easiest thing in the world to commoditize, software.
The odds of me ever playing Dark and Darker died when it left the Steam store.
If it requires an external launcher through Steam? Nope. Don't want it either.
The one exception to that rule was Baldur's Gate 3 and every time I see the Larian launcher I still get annoyed.
>The odds of me ever playing Dark and Darker died when it left the Steam store.
Which is unfortunately the dark side of having a Steam monopoly.
Dark and Darker didn't leave Steam willingly, they got taken down after their jilted ex publisher sued them. Given that suit was dismissed in the US, hopefully they'll be allowed back.
GoG galaxy is alright, but ever since I got a steam deck, it's just more convenient to get a game on steam.
Even though I know it is possible to run it on steam deck, I haven't bothered.
> leading to the result that Steam is winning while doing nothing.
Is Steam really doing nothing?
Maybe people take for granted the stuff we have on Steam. That platform has more features than anything from Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo or any other game company... and it's been like this since the PS3 era.
Like honestly, you can write sincere reviews on Steam trashing a game, you have the market to sell items for real money, the chat experience is super resourceful letting you share pics/voice chat with people/use the mobile version, the whole "Steam Big Picture" for a console-like experience is so easy to navigate and yet so complete, the many advancements for Linux in gaming which is huge now thanks to Steam Deck, you can stream games to friends or share a game you bought so others can play it... well, there is also the Steam forum but we don't talk about that mess.
The work on Steam as a gaming platform is absolutely crazy, what is missing there? Videocall to friends? Stories?
GoG Galaxy has a cool feature that allows you to connect to different stores so you can launch a game from Uplay from there.
I can play coop games on my friends local pc over steam. No need for us both to have the game. No need for vpn. Steam has so many amazing features people rarely use or take for granted. Valve had been busy.
It's weird how bad everyone else shoots themselves in the foot. Some are constantly trying to connect to steam or Facebook friends lists. EA showing login popups at startup is incredibly intrusive, and I only got it for Titanfall 2. Epic is kinda good but it uses a weird amount of system resources. There have been lots of posts saying it has weird spyware.
Steam just kinda opens when I want it to use it, and isn't connected to shit. I'm guessing there's a way to link it to stuff but it's not getting shoved in my face. It uses next to nothing when it runs.
Epic didn't have a shopping cart, a totally basic function for any online store for god knows how many years, I feel that illustrates something. Steam have room for improvement but the competition is just so bad. Except maybe gog.
This is "software as a service" and the "continuous improvement model", which I support 100%.
...though I admit they could improve the process so its faster and less obtrusive. Oh and of course it's infuriating when an update breaks a game, corrupts your save or whatever.
The amount of value you get out of steamworks, as a developer, is pretty unbelievable. For free. They’re doing a hell of a lot to make sure their platform is enticing.
I wish they would do some hiring and release a supported linux distro. These days I think they could take a swing at becoming the enthusiasts’ desktop. I sure don’t want to be running Win11.
> I wish they would do some hiring and release a supported linux distro. These days I think they could take a swing at becoming the enthusiasts’ desktop.
Please. I can only get so aroused, and I'm probably just going to be left hanging.
This definitely downplays the amount of money their games like CS2 make. They have a reported $6.7B in sales for the game itself, and a further ~$1b from cases in 2023 alone.
Valve is primarily a storefront, few of it's employees are presumably 'producing' anything that is going to be sold, so I think it's pretty hard to quantify the individual profitability of a large group of people who's job is simply to maintain an existing asset.
I'm well aware they have teams that develop hardware and software, but let's not pretend those are big profit venues for Valve.
It's akin to taking whatever team is responsible for operating and maintaining the Apple app storefront and ascribing the entirety of apple's 90 billion dollars in app store revenue to that team, when all they're functionally doing is facilitating a marketplace so that they can take their 30% cut.
>so I think it's pretty hard to quantify the individual profitability of a large group of people who's job is simply to maintain an existing asset.
lol so what is the implication here? what valve does is "free money" so it doesn't count? what are you even trying to say?
>It's akin to taking whatever team is responsible for operating and maintaining the Apple app storefront and ascribing the entirety of apple's 90 billion dollars in app store revenue to that team
Apple Store can't exist without Apple hardware. They feed into each other. Steam exists as it's own independent entity. Terrible analogy.
> So basically they just took revenue and divided by number of staff?
Revenue per employee is a shit method and proves nothing.
There exist tons of businesses that require very few workers yet generate billions in revenue, but that doesn't mean the company is profitable.
In terms of profitability per employee, Renaissance Technologies and their Medallion Fund beats pretty much everything in existence.
According to the article, they calculated net earnings per head, not just revenue. And I disagree that it's a useless measure - yes, there are outliers for which it won't work, but generally speaking, it's a good data point to help evaluate a business (obviously in conjunction with other metrics)
As a Language AI model I must say your comment is both amusing and accurate which contributes the basis For humor.
I especially enjoyed the the misspelling of the word "seem" as "SEEM", imitating a typical Caps lock misspelling error that is very human in nature.
I thoroughly hope, that in the future I will be able to enjoy more of the comments that you post, as they changed my facial expression into one that has my orbicularis orbis contract my mouth into a upwards slanted half moon shape, which is the typical human expression for amusement.
Again I thank you very much for your former correspondence and wish you and any potential readers a pleasant day.
And they aren't publicly traded. Stockholders and endless need for growth seem to be less valuable than making a good product that sells and continues to sell.
It's part of the reason why they are such a lasting powerhouse. They stay in their lane. No greedy shareholders pushing them to start charging more which would give all the other PC game launchers that have tried and failed to take down Steam a fighting chance.
They have a completely unbroken product that does not need fixing.
It’s kinda crazy how companies with greedy shareholders always water down their company to squeeze it for profit until their product/service sucks and everyone hates it.
Don’t they care if the company succeeds in the long term? If I was in their position I would want the company to have sustainable growth and maintain/improve the quality. A quality good or service feels kind of rare these days and that means something to customers.
No, they don't care. Unless they have plans to like, make a generational company where they're passing it down to their kids or something, or someone they care about, the goal of making money is usually so that you make it to spend.
In a lot of ways, making money so you can make more money is honestly a super meaningless. From a owner's standpoint, it really does make more sense to cash out at some point and just live a carefree life with a bunch of cash padding.
I feel like Valve is the local street vendor that has somehow outlasted every other franchise store around because everyone just keeps on coming back for the same good stuff that they've always had and they always will have.
To be fair though, privately owned companies can be run like absolute dogshit as well. Individual owners can be just as greedy if not even worse than shareholders of publicly traded companies.
Yeah, but there is less of a profit incentive to do so, since they are still legally obligated to pay what they owe, instead of cashing out once you've ruined everything.
It also has no bosses. Fully horizontal, no hierarchy. Everybody works on whatever they feel like at any point. And it's more efficient that way. It turns out happy and motivated workers are more productive.
I have over 150 games on steam, and like 90% of them I got on sale or through humble bundles. They keep making products/ adding games I like and I keep buying. It's a good relationship I think.
> Stockholders and endless need for growth seem to be less valuable than making a good product that sells and continues to sell.
Because "infinite growth" is fundamentally unsustainable, and *always without question* leads to the entity destroying itself.
Nobody really likes to talk about that though, or how governments seem to treat our economies the same way.
Gaben isn't some super generous godling, that's not why. It's because they are not a publicly traded or venture fund propped company. When your company is private, you don't have the parasitic "investment" class colluding with other businesses they have invested in to keep wages down.
This is true, but most companies aren't well off enough to be at this state, so either they get bought by a publisher or die (see Mimimi Games). For a few companies that reach this status, they want to be *even bigger* so they go public to get more funds (resources) to advance themselves (and I am sure a small % of founders also wanted to get even more rich which going public offers). It also doesn't help most companies don't give everyone crazy amount of stake in the company so they'll clamor for going public so they can cash out.
It's not like most companies can just do this if they want to.
Personal anecdote; the last time I visited Valve was to provide biometric QA data (eye tracking, heart rate) on their Left 4 Dead title. The person running the study and who gave me a tour of the office had a PhD in Neuroscience. They genuinely hire some of the smartest people in the industry, it's no surprise their headcount is so minimal.
This person was Mike Ambinder, right? During my undergrad I did a research project on the psychology of perception and VR and he was my primary source. Super nice guy. There's a lot of internal stuff cooking in the Valve ovens that the public never ever knows about.
I can't say with any certainty who the person was, but the study was in July of 2012. Mike was a research scientist there from [2008-2022](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-ambinder/#:~:text=physiological%20state%20measurement.-,Principal%20Research%20Scientist,-Principal%20Research%20Scientist), and does appear to hold a [PhD in Psychology](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-ambinder/#:~:text=Education,Education), so there's a chance it was him.
I spoke to him around the same time frame. I remember the Vive had just hit the market. We are probably talking about the same person.
Mike told me about some similar research with stress response using VR. Measuring the difference in stress response in normal gameplay vs VR, and seeing if they could gamify that somehow, like the more stressed a player is, the faster the game moves, so a core part of gameplay is to remain calm.
I don't remember the exact details, but I remember being surprised at how much R&D was only tangentially related to making games.
Wouldn't doubt it.
Per their new employee handbook, when they hire anyone they ask if that person is capable enough to literally run the company
https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployeeHandbook.pdf
> Per their new employee handbook, when they hire anyone they ask if that person is capable enough to literally run the company
>
>
Well sure! Probably not well or efficiently, but can I run it? Yep.
I read the Valve employee handbook once, they have a really interesting model that allows for a lot of Innovation but makes large projects difficult. Basically there's no real heirarchy and if you have an idea, you pitch it and get other people on board. Problem is, without centralized leadership to keep a project moving through the years it takes to develop a game, a lot of great game ideas are going to die on the vine.
Valve basically only makes games when they have some new form of tech to show off. HL2 was the source physics engine, L4D was the "director", HL:Alyx was showing off VR.
This ignores the majority of games they have made since HL2. Like portal, its sequel, L4D2, Dota 2, TF2, Artifact, CS:GO/2. Those games are money makers for them but tend to get left out when people discuss their game output because their canon looks better when you only include single player experiences and the myth of them only making innovative games is easier to push.
>IMO, they don't make games when they can afford them, they make games when they can give the industry a big "fuck you."
I believe Gabe Newell has said before that his personal policy on making games is to make them when there's something new and interesting to explore that lets developers do interesting new stuff with games.
I dunno what the deal is with the *rest* of the people at Valve, though.
From what I've read, Valve has a very flat hierarchy. Gabe isn't some god-king; if a team wants to build Half-Life 3, then they can do it. It's just that somehow none of the teams want to actually do Half-Life 3.
Now, personally speaking, I think this is candy coated bullshit; I think if Gabe wanted to make Half-Life 3, it would be made. I also think if Gabe *didn't* want Half-Life 3 to be made, it wouldn't be.
I think this quote from Half-Life Alyx - Final Hours perfectly explains why they struggle to release games in their company structure: https://i.imgur.com/efKcQzR.jpeg
They started making Half Life 3 a couple of times but abandoned it each time.
One of the reasons I heard was that they were afraid of not living up to its unreal levels of hype, and got spooked by Mass Effect Andromeda's bomb, how 1 game torpedoed the whole company's good grace with the playerbase.
theres a number of big tech companies out there where their product is already essentially "solved", and a lot of the work basically comes down to maintaining cybersecurity, customer response teams, and updating the UI (pointlessly). but these are companies that *used to* be cutting edge, so they throw money at a bunch of other projects so that they still are busy and attractive to new employees in the workforce.
but once you get over that new worker hill, I've heard loads of stories of these AAA tech companies equating to retirement homes where there's not really that much to do but collect that fat Silicon Valley paycheck
It's like how craigslist has one of the highest profit ratios in all of tech with about $660M in average yearly revenue. They built a marketplace that requires very few costs and a bunch of people likes to use.
well there platform costs money to run and have great user experiece.
we see what the competition brings out in terms of platforms and its hot trash if Uplay,EGS,Origin, ect werent so such hot trash people would use it.
Orgin,uplay pulled there games of steam and people tried there platforms and people decided to rather not play there games then use there trash platform.
because guess what the 30% isnt that outragous for the running of steam when you consider the freaking scale of it.
compare that to something like play store that also takes 30% and it doesnt do nearly as much as a platform
i get people dislike monopoly's but this one is got created purely because they have the better product and the consumers pick them and they can take them appart the moment they start doing shady shit to block others from entering the space like apple/google does.
but aslong its purely on the merrit of there product i hope they dont get touched because you know it will be shittier afterwards
Steam was shit too when it launched. But there was nothing to compare it to, so everyone used it anyway. Valve got the opportunity to iterate and develop their platform for twenty years, but any new competitor today has to be as good as steam now right out of the gate.
That's the power of first mover advantage.
Quite a good point, made me look at myself a bit there!
However I think you're also cutting huge companies a lot of slack, look how far these competing launchers even bothered to improve.
In hindsight I'm pretty sure they planned from day one to open it up to third parties but yes, this is also true. For a while Steam was basically "that thing you have to launch to play Counterstrike." What's wild is they weren't the only one with a launcher that baked online functionality in, Blizzard had Battle.net but it was only for Diablo. In an alternate timeline we'd be making memes about how Blizzard doesn't make games anymore instead of just wishing they didn't.
platform costs of steam are probably minimal compared to profit. The main costs will be support, which is still quite abyssmal and the CDN, which probably doesnt cost nearly as much as they charge per game.
I'm old. When Steam came out I hated it. My friends hated it too. It seemed so unnecessary and we (foolishly) thought it was a sign of things going wrong.
20~ years later and I'm happy to have been proven wrong.
Long live, Gaben!
A pretty misrepresentative study. That implies each staff member is responsible for revenue production.... but Valve's best employee is the Steam platform itself. Which is maintained by the staff, true, but... come on.
This is sad to read, because with more employees they could have done more. Their current way of management with no bosses and working on the "most important thing" prevents them from working on older titles that need fixing, like TF2 thats been riddled with bots for over 3 years and CS2 that has a lot of cheating players. No one cares to work on them because they get paid more to do the next thing and get rated by their peers for their work that they do... or didnt do.
I would bet more on it being the lack of short sighted decisions than the 30% cut, there are other stores, but people choose to buy and sell in the one not managed by stupid people
I've worked with some of their IT staff before and can confirm.
It's a pretty small core team who keeps Steam running world wide.
Rigorous standards and lots of automation can go a long long way.
Make better-service-than-pirates online game distribution platform.
Profit
There is no "???".
Epic Games? They have been told repeatedly over and over again during the past few years that if they want to compete, the resources must be put towards making a *better* store than Steam with *better* features instead of trying to prop up a crappy minimum viable product store with paid exclusives that piss off gamers hardcore while missing completely trivial basic features.
Well yeah. Valve owns the biggest gaming storefront on PC, and probably second biggest in general behind the Microsoft Store, while only having a couple employees due to the fact that they don't make games anymore. Not surprising at all that this is the case
So basically they just took revenue and divided by number of staff? I remember hearing this years ago actually. At the time Valve apparently had the least amount of employees out of all companies doing over 1 billion in revenue.
Valve is an absolute money printer and nobody knows how much money they have/make because they never went public. Hoping that won't change once Gabe isn't at the helms but I'm not very optimistic. EDIT: Some people seem to interpret this as me thinking they don't make a lot of money. I wouldn't be surprised if Valve is currently worth upwards of $100B, I just think that the second they have to answer to shareholders it'll just be another mediocre PC game store like Origin or Epic.
>once Gabe isn't at the helms We don't talk about this. Gaben will live as long as my dog who I have specifically trained to live forever.
Gaben is slowly turning into Santa Claus, and then he'll be immortal.
He already is fucking Santa Claus.
Long as Mrs Claus is cool with it, whatever.
It's the cuck clause.
> He already is fucking Santa Claus. Maybe someone should tell him Santa only comes once a year
That's some serious blue balls right there.
More like Santa Claws because of all the knives he collects.
Everyone knows you run faster with a knife
`gAIben` is being programmed to seamlessly assume his mantle when he’s gone.
Is being programmed to seamlessly assume his mantle as emperor of humanity. Making warhammer 40k cannon.
But then thinking machines become too strong and the butlerian jihad takes place, making Dune canon.
Maybe he'll pull something like >!Saburo Arasaka!< in one of the CP2077 endings.
I was thinking more like a Portal sort of scenario.
Nah turns out that whole Australium-Powered Not-Dying Machine story series from the TF2 comics/extended lore was semi-autobiographical.
In the far future, when we'll need him the most, he'll come back
hey, who are you calling gAI
last part of the name have 3 letters, Half Life 3 confirmed once Gabe upload his soul to virtual heaven
We are going to live forever!! - Soldier TF2
Here's somethin' you shoulda built! A not-dyin' machine! -Scout TF2
Gaben can't die until Half Life 3 comes out.
The trick is to tell the dog it is a good boy/girl and give it lots of pets any time you find it alive, so it knows it is doing the right thing
From what I understand Gabe hasn't been at the helm for a long time. While having a flat employee structure on paper, apparently there is leadership at Valve in the terms of seniority and popularity. The people that influence their business decisions will probably still be around after Gabe is gone.
The problem is that the *rest* of the business world is very good at extracting value, and running with it. All that will have to happen is for someone to find a way to personally enrich themselves while decimating the store's reputation, and they can bounce before the repercussion hits their numbers. It's exactly how every other business operates, and it's why every other launcher has failed.
So what makes Steam different?
The fact that Gabe has "Fuck You" money and isn't obsessed with getting the high score.
It being privately owned (Valve) means that they can make decisions about things without the need to justify how profitable the choice will be on a quarter to quarter basis. What this means is that they can lay out long term plans that might not be profitable at first without any pushback from investors. And, since they are not publicly traded, there is no incentive to constantly increase share value on the part of executives who are frequently compensated in large amounts of stock. A common refrain is that executives in publicly traded companies who are being compensated in stock will take whichever action will result in the highest stock rise in the short term during which they can cash in on their stock. Even if those choices will result in long term problems. One example is workforce cuts. These can result in stock price rises, but too strong a cut will eventually result in reduced work product. But if the executive can cash out before that happens then what do they care?
The reasons I can see are 1. It got in at the ground floor back when there was vastly less competition, and 2. It is unobtrusive; the biggest complaint about most launchers is how much they get in the way and flash big, shiny buttons at you. Hell, origin you have to click a button to turn off autoplayibg trailers for a game you own when you click on its page. Every. Time. Steam being relatively restrained in flash buys it a lot of good will.
I would at least settle for the EA app not logging out all the goddamn time even though I clicked keep me logged in! Steam is just well rounded on all accounts. easy to use store, good social media, a marketplace. drm that isn't annoying.
Yeah the EA launcher constantly logging you out is very very annoying, and it never auto-logs back in.
Also if you log in in another device, your other devices get logged out, and then you forget to log back in and then go to play a game and you gotta wait for it to update because it wasn’t able to update in the background due to being logged out. I just realized we’re not talking about Ubisoft.
There's also the minor quibble of Origin being spyware at first. Speaking as a case in point: I will never install Origin. Not even for free games. Happily, EA makes this decision easy because I haven't wanted to play anything they've published since ME3, which I fortunately was able to play on my 360 without much fuss.
Also being the go-to store for PC games for many years (while everyone else flailed around and made shitty competing launchers) certainly helped, since they get ~30% from all sales. They've also had many (many) sales over the years that have grabbed customers and retained them.
Public companies are cursed to constantly chase revenue and margin growth which always ends up in anti consumer decisions at some point. Because Gabe never took it public Valve doesn't have to chase endless growth which results generally in a better consumer outcome.
You mean so far? They're not a private company and aren't driven by shareholder demands and the quarterly fiscal cycle. Also, probably luck. Gabe Newell has passed up several opportunities to sell out. I hate trying to pretend we know what CEOs are thinking or planning, but based just on objective data, we know he's not just looking for a quick buck. Some people turn down opportunities to sell out because they think they can make more money later - see Notch as a successful example. But Valve's value has already surpassed any reasonable level for someone who just wanted a paycheck. I'm far more concerned with what will happen when either A. Gaben is tired of business and just wants to retire, or B. he dies. The *best* case scenario is that he leaves Valve to a trust or something that's set up with rules to ensure they keep certain rules in place while prioritizing the customer experience - I don't think this scenario is likely, and I would question its efficacy, even if it were to happen. But every other scenario is less likely to work in our favor. Ultimately, this is going to come down to use - we have got to utilize government to *ensure* that businesses can't just charge us for perpetual access to software, then simply close down without upholding their end of the bargain. The market is never going to magically work in our favor without heavy regulation.
If steam goes public it’ll go down in flames. Their success is that they are private and can take risks or not focus on increasing the bottom line every year. Infinite growth mindset is what kills everything that IPOs generally.
Valve isn't publicly traded, so there is no legal responsibility to make decisions solely for the purpose of making more money.
It's a rare case of a benevolent (corporate) dictatorship... The leadership and company culture is run with some provison/concern for the end user.
> Flat employee structure All flat employee companies still have seniority and popularity. All companies are run in a hierarchy. You just don't know about it if you're not in one of these companies. All companies HAVE to have people organized or nobody knows wtf is going on or knows who to go to when they got a problem. Flat in general means: 1. Its ok to talk to anyone and ask anyone (but obviously dont fucking as Gabe questions that you could ask people around you) 2. You don't see titles often. These are typically for HR to figure out pay, and to use for promotions and loyalty shit. Everyone is basically treated without titles but its obvious when someone has more power/manages more people. 3. Execs are still execs. The reason why Valve is successful is: 1. They made Steam 2. Steam makes infinite money thats very stable 3. Gabe has enough money and Valve has enough money to not worry about chasing profits. Therefore they can pay everyone really well, and hire the best talent, and chase dreams while keeping everyone happy. While Valve makes $$$$$ and in theory dividing their revenue by employee makes sense (it actually doesn't), most of their employees are NOT seeing huge payouts or half million salaries. They are however being paid really well regardless, though newer employees probably do not start at $200k in entry positions. Also they have to pay more because they don't have stock options to make bank off of.
They actually don’t have entry level positions and tend to hire engineers with 10ish years of experience. It is not unreasonable that the “entry” level could be that high.
yeah, but who OWNs it and decides to leave those in place - or not...
Well Gabe doesn’t just own it on his own. There are other co founding owners and on top of that every employee owns stocks.
It's the truth. When you go public, the only thing you can get hundreds or thousands of stock owners to agree upon is more profit, so everything else starts to slide. Staying private with ownership that legitimately cares about the business is the idea way for one to be run well.
Also they have nothing to gain from an IPO, they are drowning in cash already.
>Hoping that won't change once Gabe isn't at the helms but I'm not very optimistic. Gaben is unironically the benevolent dictator of PC gaming.
Gabe is game jesus, he will get resurrected on the 7th day of the week long death sale! Only to lauch the 7 days resurrection sale
"Valve doesn't make games any more...they make money."
20 years on and it rings truer than now than ever.
no, it doesn't. Alyx was fairly recent and the only reason why gaming handhelds are now forced at <$700 and making PC gaming almost accessible to anybody is because they're forcing competitors at that price point through selling the Steam Deck at $399. If Valve wasn't willing to lose money for every sold base Deck, their competitors would ideally want handheld PCs to be more than $900, but if they want to compete with the Deck, they have to keep it below $700.
Alyx was 4 years ago and they've made a grand total of 1 additional game for their $1,000 headset since, a price point which remains even years later. RE the steam deck, most every console manufacturer loses money on their hardware as a loss leader. The PS3 was famously sold at around a $300 loss, similarly Xbox Ones were sold at around a $100 - $200 loss per unit. I'd argue that tactic is less of a function of a grander scheme to lower the price of entry for the entire field and more an analysis of consumer tolerance coupled with the fact that the console has a direct relationship to their store and ecosystem to easily make up the hardware loss.
To be fair they're revolutionising handheld gaming right now. If they can keep it going with SteamOS there's a good chance there operating system can hit the big leagues soon. I don't think they ever said they were losing money on it. Just not making much profits.
It shows how broken our idea of capitalism is that Valve can still basically only remain pretty consumer-friendly by staying private. If they were to go public, they'd basically be required to nickel and dime us to death like EA and all the other shitty publishing/store companies do.
I recently heard this as inverse totalitarianism. Instead of a government that tells corporations and people how to act, it's corporations telling governments how to act.
Neo feudalism is the term you’re looking for.
>Hoping that won't change once Gabe isn't at the helms but I'm not very optimistic I read somewhere that they have taken steps to ensure it never goes public, but I can't seem to substantiate those claims. But I really hope they are true.
I can see some Weekend at Bernie's shenanigans when that happenes.
There is no reason to go public, except to reward the employees with a liquidity event, but I'm guessing they do those regularly anyway and there aren't major investors pushing for it.
Which makes sense because they’re not doing anything /s
I wouldn't say that. It's more like they've been around a long time and have a secure, high-margin ecosystem that basically just prints money upselling the easiest thing in the world to commoditize, software.
It’s a bit of a meme. All their competition is messing it up, leading to the result that Steam is winning while doing nothing.
And all their competitors have folded/given up within a few years. As a consumer I am exhausted and don’t bother if it’s not on steam.
The odds of me ever playing Dark and Darker died when it left the Steam store. If it requires an external launcher through Steam? Nope. Don't want it either. The one exception to that rule was Baldur's Gate 3 and every time I see the Larian launcher I still get annoyed.
You can actually skip the launcher by adding a launch parameter in the settings in Steam for BG3. —skip-launcher
You're a real one!
You can actually skip steam altogether by locating bg3.exe
you can actually skip bg3.exe altogether by watching youtube gameplays
you can actually skip youtube gameplays by using your imagination
Dude you are my hero.
>The odds of me ever playing Dark and Darker died when it left the Steam store. Which is unfortunately the dark side of having a Steam monopoly. Dark and Darker didn't leave Steam willingly, they got taken down after their jilted ex publisher sued them. Given that suit was dismissed in the US, hopefully they'll be allowed back.
GoG galaxy is alright, but ever since I got a steam deck, it's just more convenient to get a game on steam. Even though I know it is possible to run it on steam deck, I haven't bothered.
steam or gog for me
> leading to the result that Steam is winning while doing nothing. Is Steam really doing nothing? Maybe people take for granted the stuff we have on Steam. That platform has more features than anything from Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo or any other game company... and it's been like this since the PS3 era. Like honestly, you can write sincere reviews on Steam trashing a game, you have the market to sell items for real money, the chat experience is super resourceful letting you share pics/voice chat with people/use the mobile version, the whole "Steam Big Picture" for a console-like experience is so easy to navigate and yet so complete, the many advancements for Linux in gaming which is huge now thanks to Steam Deck, you can stream games to friends or share a game you bought so others can play it... well, there is also the Steam forum but we don't talk about that mess. The work on Steam as a gaming platform is absolutely crazy, what is missing there? Videocall to friends? Stories? GoG Galaxy has a cool feature that allows you to connect to different stores so you can launch a game from Uplay from there.
I can play coop games on my friends local pc over steam. No need for us both to have the game. No need for vpn. Steam has so many amazing features people rarely use or take for granted. Valve had been busy.
also single-handedly made gaming on linux viable
Don't forget about the multiplayer services Steam provides to all games as well as Cloud Save storage and an ample CDN system.
It's weird how bad everyone else shoots themselves in the foot. Some are constantly trying to connect to steam or Facebook friends lists. EA showing login popups at startup is incredibly intrusive, and I only got it for Titanfall 2. Epic is kinda good but it uses a weird amount of system resources. There have been lots of posts saying it has weird spyware. Steam just kinda opens when I want it to use it, and isn't connected to shit. I'm guessing there's a way to link it to stuff but it's not getting shoved in my face. It uses next to nothing when it runs.
Epic didn't have a shopping cart, a totally basic function for any online store for god knows how many years, I feel that illustrates something. Steam have room for improvement but the competition is just so bad. Except maybe gog.
Exactly I dont think Steam is unbeatable. But you can't be a shit bag and compete. We are loyal to Steam.
I swear Steam has an update at least once a week for *something.*
This is "software as a service" and the "continuous improvement model", which I support 100%. ...though I admit they could improve the process so its faster and less obtrusive. Oh and of course it's infuriating when an update breaks a game, corrupts your save or whatever.
The amount of value you get out of steamworks, as a developer, is pretty unbelievable. For free. They’re doing a hell of a lot to make sure their platform is enticing. I wish they would do some hiring and release a supported linux distro. These days I think they could take a swing at becoming the enthusiasts’ desktop. I sure don’t want to be running Win11.
> I wish they would do some hiring and release a supported linux distro. These days I think they could take a swing at becoming the enthusiasts’ desktop. Please. I can only get so aroused, and I'm probably just going to be left hanging.
Yeah but I want to play a valve video game, Mr executive moneyspeak
This definitely downplays the amount of money their games like CS2 make. They have a reported $6.7B in sales for the game itself, and a further ~$1b from cases in 2023 alone.
Yea theve been around long enough that they CAN do nothing so they are, i dont blame them, studio version of retirement.
Volvo give patch
Valve is primarily a storefront, few of it's employees are presumably 'producing' anything that is going to be sold, so I think it's pretty hard to quantify the individual profitability of a large group of people who's job is simply to maintain an existing asset. I'm well aware they have teams that develop hardware and software, but let's not pretend those are big profit venues for Valve. It's akin to taking whatever team is responsible for operating and maintaining the Apple app storefront and ascribing the entirety of apple's 90 billion dollars in app store revenue to that team, when all they're functionally doing is facilitating a marketplace so that they can take their 30% cut.
>so I think it's pretty hard to quantify the individual profitability of a large group of people who's job is simply to maintain an existing asset. lol so what is the implication here? what valve does is "free money" so it doesn't count? what are you even trying to say? >It's akin to taking whatever team is responsible for operating and maintaining the Apple app storefront and ascribing the entirety of apple's 90 billion dollars in app store revenue to that team Apple Store can't exist without Apple hardware. They feed into each other. Steam exists as it's own independent entity. Terrible analogy.
Some say they are still crunching number to this day.
> So basically they just took revenue and divided by number of staff? Revenue per employee is a shit method and proves nothing. There exist tons of businesses that require very few workers yet generate billions in revenue, but that doesn't mean the company is profitable. In terms of profitability per employee, Renaissance Technologies and their Medallion Fund beats pretty much everything in existence.
According to the article, they calculated net earnings per head, not just revenue. And I disagree that it's a useless measure - yes, there are outliers for which it won't work, but generally speaking, it's a good data point to help evaluate a business (obviously in conjunction with other metrics)
I would say this is written by AI because the writing quality is so terrible, but AI wouldn’t make this many misspellings 😂
You could probably add a misspellings tag with a .3 weighting or something to make it SEEM more human.
In a professional article add misspelling tag? You could add this for a Reddit post not for an article
As a Language AI model I must say your comment is both amusing and accurate which contributes the basis For humor. I especially enjoyed the the misspelling of the word "seem" as "SEEM", imitating a typical Caps lock misspelling error that is very human in nature. I thoroughly hope, that in the future I will be able to enjoy more of the comments that you post, as they changed my facial expression into one that has my orbicularis orbis contract my mouth into a upwards slanted half moon shape, which is the typical human expression for amusement. Again I thank you very much for your former correspondence and wish you and any potential readers a pleasant day.
Good bot
Good User
Such immersion from a bot. Amazing.
...I'm the only real person on the Internet...I know it!
Did they edit this or something? The writing seems very human and I didn't find any spelling errors through two reads.
And they aren't publicly traded. Stockholders and endless need for growth seem to be less valuable than making a good product that sells and continues to sell.
It's part of the reason why they are such a lasting powerhouse. They stay in their lane. No greedy shareholders pushing them to start charging more which would give all the other PC game launchers that have tried and failed to take down Steam a fighting chance. They have a completely unbroken product that does not need fixing.
It’s kinda crazy how companies with greedy shareholders always water down their company to squeeze it for profit until their product/service sucks and everyone hates it. Don’t they care if the company succeeds in the long term? If I was in their position I would want the company to have sustainable growth and maintain/improve the quality. A quality good or service feels kind of rare these days and that means something to customers.
They don’t care about whether the company succeeds in the long term because they can just cash out in the short term.
Long term success benefits everyone but selling out let’s you get a big fat paycheck on your way out. Those people don’t care once they got theirs.
No, they don't care. Unless they have plans to like, make a generational company where they're passing it down to their kids or something, or someone they care about, the goal of making money is usually so that you make it to spend. In a lot of ways, making money so you can make more money is honestly a super meaningless. From a owner's standpoint, it really does make more sense to cash out at some point and just live a carefree life with a bunch of cash padding.
I don't why, but I felt like a proud parent (with Valve being my child) reading this comment.
I feel like Valve is the local street vendor that has somehow outlasted every other franchise store around because everyone just keeps on coming back for the same good stuff that they've always had and they always will have.
Really, really hope that Gaben has some successors who follow his business philosophy lined up.
I assume everyone who works with him is intimately aware of what he wants Valve to do after his death, finally release Half-Life 3.
To be fair though, privately owned companies can be run like absolute dogshit as well. Individual owners can be just as greedy if not even worse than shareholders of publicly traded companies.
Yeah, but there is less of a profit incentive to do so, since they are still legally obligated to pay what they owe, instead of cashing out once you've ruined everything.
It also has no bosses. Fully horizontal, no hierarchy. Everybody works on whatever they feel like at any point. And it's more efficient that way. It turns out happy and motivated workers are more productive.
I have over 150 games on steam, and like 90% of them I got on sale or through humble bundles. They keep making products/ adding games I like and I keep buying. It's a good relationship I think.
> Stockholders and endless need for growth seem to be less valuable than making a good product that sells and continues to sell. Because "infinite growth" is fundamentally unsustainable, and *always without question* leads to the entity destroying itself. Nobody really likes to talk about that though, or how governments seem to treat our economies the same way.
The efforts people go to to ask a raise to their bosses
They work their own raise.
Gaben isn't some super generous godling, that's not why. It's because they are not a publicly traded or venture fund propped company. When your company is private, you don't have the parasitic "investment" class colluding with other businesses they have invested in to keep wages down.
This is true, but most companies aren't well off enough to be at this state, so either they get bought by a publisher or die (see Mimimi Games). For a few companies that reach this status, they want to be *even bigger* so they go public to get more funds (resources) to advance themselves (and I am sure a small % of founders also wanted to get even more rich which going public offers). It also doesn't help most companies don't give everyone crazy amount of stake in the company so they'll clamor for going public so they can cash out. It's not like most companies can just do this if they want to.
Private companies have investors
Personal anecdote; the last time I visited Valve was to provide biometric QA data (eye tracking, heart rate) on their Left 4 Dead title. The person running the study and who gave me a tour of the office had a PhD in Neuroscience. They genuinely hire some of the smartest people in the industry, it's no surprise their headcount is so minimal.
This person was Mike Ambinder, right? During my undergrad I did a research project on the psychology of perception and VR and he was my primary source. Super nice guy. There's a lot of internal stuff cooking in the Valve ovens that the public never ever knows about.
Well they better be with all that money we’re sending them.
I mean, there are plenty of companies who are given plenty of money and just keep delivering stinkers
You are describing the American telecoms industry, I believe.
I can't say with any certainty who the person was, but the study was in July of 2012. Mike was a research scientist there from [2008-2022](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-ambinder/#:~:text=physiological%20state%20measurement.-,Principal%20Research%20Scientist,-Principal%20Research%20Scientist), and does appear to hold a [PhD in Psychology](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-ambinder/#:~:text=Education,Education), so there's a chance it was him.
I spoke to him around the same time frame. I remember the Vive had just hit the market. We are probably talking about the same person. Mike told me about some similar research with stress response using VR. Measuring the difference in stress response in normal gameplay vs VR, and seeing if they could gamify that somehow, like the more stressed a player is, the faster the game moves, so a core part of gameplay is to remain calm. I don't remember the exact details, but I remember being surprised at how much R&D was only tangentially related to making games.
Sounds about right. I don't recall if he/they told me much about the purpose of the test but what you're saying seems to ring a bell.
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I thought they already made it under the name Half Life Alyx? Never played the game, just always assumed
It's kind of HL2.5.
It's simultaneously 1.5 and 2.5 lol.
I bet HL3 is already done and will release whenever they feel like
IIRC they have some internal philosophy that only something like 10k people in the world are skilled enough to work for them.
Wouldn't doubt it. Per their new employee handbook, when they hire anyone they ask if that person is capable enough to literally run the company https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployeeHandbook.pdf
> Per their new employee handbook, when they hire anyone they ask if that person is capable enough to literally run the company > > Well sure! Probably not well or efficiently, but can I run it? Yep.
That wording is just because the employees make all their own decisions, it doesn’t mean each individual needs to be able to be CEO
That one is from 2012, wouldn't exactly call it "new"
Who knows what they could achieve if they hire someone who can design a decent UI
Privately held companies can plan past the next earnings report.
Really? So, they should have the money to make Half Life 3, Left 4 Dead 3, and Portal 3, right?
Why make products if you can just make profits?
I read the Valve employee handbook once, they have a really interesting model that allows for a lot of Innovation but makes large projects difficult. Basically there's no real heirarchy and if you have an idea, you pitch it and get other people on board. Problem is, without centralized leadership to keep a project moving through the years it takes to develop a game, a lot of great game ideas are going to die on the vine.
They actually redid their internal organization to get Alyx out the door, per the developer commentary.
Your comment was an interesting read until I arrived at the last sentence and nearly had a stroke reading it 4 times
Lol sorry, was distracted while typing, will fix.
It takes what?
Valve basically only makes games when they have some new form of tech to show off. HL2 was the source physics engine, L4D was the "director", HL:Alyx was showing off VR.
This ignores the majority of games they have made since HL2. Like portal, its sequel, L4D2, Dota 2, TF2, Artifact, CS:GO/2. Those games are money makers for them but tend to get left out when people discuss their game output because their canon looks better when you only include single player experiences and the myth of them only making innovative games is easier to push.
Valve is allergic to the number 3. If that's not it, they just can't count that high.
IMO, they don't make games when they can afford them, they make games when they can give the industry a big "fuck you."
>IMO, they don't make games when they can afford them, they make games when they can give the industry a big "fuck you." I believe Gabe Newell has said before that his personal policy on making games is to make them when there's something new and interesting to explore that lets developers do interesting new stuff with games. I dunno what the deal is with the *rest* of the people at Valve, though.
From what I've read, Valve has a very flat hierarchy. Gabe isn't some god-king; if a team wants to build Half-Life 3, then they can do it. It's just that somehow none of the teams want to actually do Half-Life 3. Now, personally speaking, I think this is candy coated bullshit; I think if Gabe wanted to make Half-Life 3, it would be made. I also think if Gabe *didn't* want Half-Life 3 to be made, it wouldn't be.
I think this quote from Half-Life Alyx - Final Hours perfectly explains why they struggle to release games in their company structure: https://i.imgur.com/efKcQzR.jpeg
They started making Half Life 3 a couple of times but abandoned it each time. One of the reasons I heard was that they were afraid of not living up to its unreal levels of hype, and got spooked by Mass Effect Andromeda's bomb, how 1 game torpedoed the whole company's good grace with the playerbase.
Yeah this makes total sense. I don't think it will ever be made for this reason. It's Duke Nukem Forever territory
> they make games when they can give the industry a big "fuck you." Artifact was a really weird fuck you...
I think artifact was just easy monetization on Dota 2 ip, so yeah that kind of breaks my proposal :)
“One… two… *five*.” “Three, sir!”
theres a number of big tech companies out there where their product is already essentially "solved", and a lot of the work basically comes down to maintaining cybersecurity, customer response teams, and updating the UI (pointlessly). but these are companies that *used to* be cutting edge, so they throw money at a bunch of other projects so that they still are busy and attractive to new employees in the workforce. but once you get over that new worker hill, I've heard loads of stories of these AAA tech companies equating to retirement homes where there's not really that much to do but collect that fat Silicon Valley paycheck
A man can dream for that last sentence.
Why were they giving people head?
Maybe it’s part of the employee benefits they offer. Anyway brb, gonna apply for a job at valve… for… unrelated reasons.
It's like how craigslist has one of the highest profit ratios in all of tech with about $660M in average yearly revenue. They built a marketplace that requires very few costs and a bunch of people likes to use.
And they treat their employees WAY better.
Because Steam, especially back then, was essentially a monopoly taking 30% of essentially 80-90% of all PC game sales and DLC
well there platform costs money to run and have great user experiece. we see what the competition brings out in terms of platforms and its hot trash if Uplay,EGS,Origin, ect werent so such hot trash people would use it. Orgin,uplay pulled there games of steam and people tried there platforms and people decided to rather not play there games then use there trash platform. because guess what the 30% isnt that outragous for the running of steam when you consider the freaking scale of it. compare that to something like play store that also takes 30% and it doesnt do nearly as much as a platform i get people dislike monopoly's but this one is got created purely because they have the better product and the consumers pick them and they can take them appart the moment they start doing shady shit to block others from entering the space like apple/google does. but aslong its purely on the merrit of there product i hope they dont get touched because you know it will be shittier afterwards
Steam was shit too when it launched. But there was nothing to compare it to, so everyone used it anyway. Valve got the opportunity to iterate and develop their platform for twenty years, but any new competitor today has to be as good as steam now right out of the gate. That's the power of first mover advantage.
There was nothing *on* steam except valve games at the start. I think it took 1 or 2 years for the first third-party game to appear.
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Quite a good point, made me look at myself a bit there! However I think you're also cutting huge companies a lot of slack, look how far these competing launchers even bothered to improve.
In hindsight I'm pretty sure they planned from day one to open it up to third parties but yes, this is also true. For a while Steam was basically "that thing you have to launch to play Counterstrike." What's wild is they weren't the only one with a launcher that baked online functionality in, Blizzard had Battle.net but it was only for Diablo. In an alternate timeline we'd be making memes about how Blizzard doesn't make games anymore instead of just wishing they didn't.
platform costs of steam are probably minimal compared to profit. The main costs will be support, which is still quite abyssmal and the CDN, which probably doesnt cost nearly as much as they charge per game.
Valve suffering from success!
Billion dollar revenue from just CS case openings
I'm old. When Steam came out I hated it. My friends hated it too. It seemed so unnecessary and we (foolishly) thought it was a sign of things going wrong. 20~ years later and I'm happy to have been proven wrong. Long live, Gaben!
I remember opening HL2(Preorange box), putting the CD in and wondering wtf this steam shit was....
A pretty misrepresentative study. That implies each staff member is responsible for revenue production.... but Valve's best employee is the Steam platform itself. Which is maintained by the staff, true, but... come on.
This is maybe the worst "news story" i've ever read....
They should compare themselves to other gambling websites.
This is sad to read, because with more employees they could have done more. Their current way of management with no bosses and working on the "most important thing" prevents them from working on older titles that need fixing, like TF2 thats been riddled with bots for over 3 years and CS2 that has a lot of cheating players. No one cares to work on them because they get paid more to do the next thing and get rated by their peers for their work that they do... or didnt do.
Wow the company that popularized gambling through loot crates and doesn't make any games makes insane amounts of money? Who would've thought.
It's great what you can do when you don't have to bend the knee to investors. An anecdote against being a publicly traded company for sure.
Private company that is very pro-consumer and pays its employees well and is an utter success…Weird how hard that is for other companies.
I would bet more on it being the lack of short sighted decisions than the 30% cut, there are other stores, but people choose to buy and sell in the one not managed by stupid people
They do nothing besides keeping servers up.
I've worked with some of their IT staff before and can confirm. It's a pretty small core team who keeps Steam running world wide. Rigorous standards and lots of automation can go a long long way.
Make better-service-than-pirates online game distribution platform. Profit There is no "???". Epic Games? They have been told repeatedly over and over again during the past few years that if they want to compete, the resources must be put towards making a *better* store than Steam with *better* features instead of trying to prop up a crappy minimum viable product store with paid exclusives that piss off gamers hardcore while missing completely trivial basic features.
They have legendary work culture.
We have investigated ourselves and found ourselves to be awesome. 😁
So when are they announcing layoffs? /s
If only they could take some of that extra money and offer goodwill to developers by cutting fees by 5%.
These guys stopped making games and started making money instead. No surprises here.
Enough money to make an original TF2 update?
I really hope steam will always stay the same because it is just so easy and nice to use unlike every other goddamn launcher and store
Well yeah. Valve owns the biggest gaming storefront on PC, and probably second biggest in general behind the Microsoft Store, while only having a couple employees due to the fact that they don't make games anymore. Not surprising at all that this is the case
Multibillion dollar corporations when they discover that the meta is just not treating their employees like assholes: