Steam Is Run By Fewer Than 80 Staff, Lawsuit Docs Reveal
It has been revealed through a series of lawsuit-related documents that Steam is maintained by a relatively small team.
Reliable, low maitenance, with good infastructure. 80 sounds like a solid number when not including game devs and support staff.
80 world-class engineers sounds like more than enough people. It’s not like Valve struggle to acquire talent and are thus forced to have teams and teams of juniors who are masters at building tech debt.
Valve will likely be hiring and retaining the kinds of engineers who love a good refactor and appreciate the time and space to do that rather than some product manager pressuring for the next shiny shit they wanted yesterday.
And Steam is their money printing machine that keeps them free to do whatever they want. It’s no surprise their team have stayed invested in continuing to build out the best gaming platform of all time.
80 talented, passionate, and healthily paid engineers > 800 junior, sleep deprived, and struggling to buy groceries “coders”.
For serious. I wish they hired remote.
Love to refactor, the more I watch the Mesa graphics drivers and the employees valve hired that work on it the more I believe it
Also explains why Steam is still a 32-bit binary and didn't get ARM port on any platform.
I think the point is that with this kind of upkeep costs it's hard to argue that Steam sales cut is fair, especially given near-monopoly in PC gaming space.
At this point, their cut is just about mathematically fair, given how little value customers get from buying games most other places and how much value they get from Steam. Then that money got funneled back into decoupling PC gaming from Microsoft and making probably the only mass produced handheld gaming system that's open enough to let you opt out of their ecosystem. I'd be really curious as to how many games on Steam even have ARM builds, because I'll bet it's a very low number, and that would likely make the juice not worth the squeeze.
it's hard to argue that Steam sales cut is fair
It's actually pretty easy to argue it's fair once you look at everything. Steam offers a shit ton of resources for that 30%, including hosting, distribution, patching, workshop, etc. And that's not even getting into the fact that the dev can get all of that AND get steam keys that they can distribute themselves (meaning valve doesn't get a cut of that) that still utilizes the same infra.
I wish I could find it, but I recently saw a video of Thor (@piratesoftware, does his own game dev and used to work for Blizzard) talking about this and going into even more detail than I can remember at the moment.
After that well-informed take, listen to an actual indie developer talk about why the 30% is worth it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwoAmifo9r0 (it's a separate but similar lawsuit by a "waaahmbulance-chaser" law firm in the UK)
Who the fuck cares what's with this constant desire to try and shit on steam
Because they tried competing and it didn't work because they kept offering an inferior product, so they're trying to weasel Steam out of the market
As for as storefronts go, which is what's being talked about here, they are competing and winning. With a fraction of the employees other companies employ for storefront work. Origin (Rest Unpeacefully) and Uplay never stood a chance and epic has had plenty of time to market saturate. The company not being publicly traded doesn't prevent competition, it prevents investor interests like quashing competition.
Shit on? This is some baller ass shit -- What is the rev per employee a billion dollars?!?!?!
I don't know, there's plenty of anti-Valve rhetoric on Lemmy. Plenty of people try to spin it as Valve having a low employee count because they have a lot of contractors. One guy was making a point that Valve employee count is much lower because they buy in AMD GPUs for the Steam Deck... As if Valve should buy chip manufacturing plants and design and manufacture their own GPUs.
Even here somewhere below (or maybe up later) in this thread someone said
Also, a company can pretend to have 10 employees if it instead hires 1000 contractors to do the actual work.
Which is an argument, if you can prove Valve is buying in 10 times the amount of contractors as they have employees for positions that should go to full-time employees. But I very much doubt such information exists.
I definitely didn't interpret this as shitting on Steam. In fact, the opposite.
These numbers keep getting smaller with every headline. Tomorrow it says that Steam runs off of Gabens private NAS.
Failure of larger companies to make a competitive alternative to steam is not anticompetitive behavior on the part of Valve
Seems like a good example of how running a company for the shareholders doesn’t produce a a better product after all.
Precisely what the share holders don't want people to know. They worship money and what the public to think more money = more good. If people realize these investor backed products are generally not anything better than someone can make in their garage they'll stop buying overpriced junk. So here we are about to see how the sausage gets made.
Product becomes the byproduct. Dividends and massive returns are the #1 priority.
B-b-b-bingo
The case seems like such a reach. At worst it's an effective monopoly for devs, not consumers. Devs have a really hard time selling elsewhere.
That said, I love Steam and think it's genuinely one of the best companies out there. And whilst it's not great that they're so big, they aren't that big due to anti-competitive behaviour. It's quite the opposite. You can add non-Steam games to your library and use Steam features. The fucking Steam deck isn't locked down, and you can install non-Steam games. Just because Uplay wants to log me out every time I reboot doesn't mean Steam should be sued.
There are so many other companies more deserving of the lawsuit
Nintendo for example
Had me in the first half ngl
Yeah who TF are their lawyers? Anticompetitive behavior is just that—there have o be actions taken, at least in the United States. And Steam doesn't have exclusivity agreements so IDK what they're gonna argue.
The closest thing they can argue to any kind of "exclusivity" is that the free steam keys developers can generate for their games may not be resold for a lower amount than the game can be purchased for on steam outright. That says nothing about other means of distributing the game outside of steam, and nothing about alternative platforms the devs might want to use. It's a tiny and far away straw to grasp at.
TF2 lawyers, it would seem.
Their legal Offense has evidently been workgrouped by Scout, Soldier and Pyro, judging by this particular legal argument. To think the Mercenaries would turn on their creator... Well, they're mercenaries!
80 people who are doing a bang-up job, i might add.
But Infinite growth!! How do you affirm the ability for a new CEO to make tough decisions without going on insane hiring sprees to show growth, and then firing those same people to cut corners and also show growth!? The economy needs blood!
Oh wait, they’re not publically traded? I thought only corner shops were allowed to stay off the market.
Okay, end savage stock market mockery.
There's also such a thing as a blue chip stock.
That's just a name we give to "a share of a well-known, profitable, and established company with a history of success". I.e. "companies that experience constant and consistent growth". That's literally what OP is criticizing. They do the same things. Microsoft is a blue chip. You think they don't have layoffs to appease shareholders? Google? Apple?
A lot of companies have been trying to sue them and are trying to tarnish their name in any way possible because their case is already shaky at best. The whole "monopoly" thing despite competition existing and Valve only being on top because they're the best feature wise stuff.
"Companies have too many employees!" cries the guy who will lose his job if all companies are run like Valve.
Them having few employees doesn't prevent them from taking a 30% cut on all sales and making billions in profit and having a billionaire at their head, so are people expecting that if other companies were "trimming down some fat" it wouldn't simply result in them making more profit because prices wouldn't come down or something?
Also, a company can pretend to have 10 employees if it instead hires 1000 contractors to do the actual work.
"Companies have too many employees!" cries the guy who will lose his job if all companies are run like Valve.
Less wasting resources, good. Ah, you mean under capitalism.
Pretty amazing that years of effort from massive competitors like Epic and Microsoft haven't managed to crack this. I wonder what they're doing wrong?
(Ok I lied. I know exactly what they're doing wrong and there's zero chance of them changing.)
The Microsoft Store and how to redeem games is so mind-numbly stupid. GamePass wowed me with their library and the subscription service. But how they do everything, from DRMing their games in a absolute mindfuckery app folder, to locking it into your Microsoft account and ecosystem, was so frustrating. Modding? Eat a Microdick. Hell, save files don't even transfer between Steam and Microsoft GamePass games because FUCK YOU PLAYERS.
I'm glad Steam was extremely proactive at moving off of Windows.
Well large corporations are at least 50% dead weight by volume, weighted overwhelmingly in management and at the executive level. So naturally it's the ones doing all the ACTUAL work who get terminated whenever the line isn't going up hard enough. Capitalism folks, it's doomed us all and there's no way we can fix it and those who could never will.
I genuinely can't fathom why this number should be bigger. What am I supposed to take away from this knowledge? Far as I'm concerned, Valve is still a rare comparative good guy in the dense-packed field of bad guys in industry
Because we have been led to believe that the "titans" of industry are these super above average smart people. In reality it's a bunch of nepo babies with no unique skills (other than, perhaps, a good education) which only copy each other.
After covid, all big IT companies started hiring like mad men... Then they all started firing people like crazy. They are driven more by speculation on their stock price and FOMO than any actual business strategy
Maybe in the distant pre-cloud past, when sysadmins were still a thing, you'd expect a bigger staff to be needed to manage a bigger datacenter.
But a few devs who know how to spin up a thing with auto-scaling can accomplish a lot
But a few devs who know how to spin up a thing with auto-scaling can accomplish a lot
This is true, but I still find it impressive that Valve has seemingly managed to find 80 all in one spot. My company can barely find one or two
All i read is "Damn, they're a super capable team."
Who probably tear ass around the office in camaros.
Bitchin' Camaros!
That's an insanely efficient machine.
Why is this getting posted so often?
I honestly think it's a badge of honor.
I worked in a company where we had 1000+ engineers on a SAAS platform for three years. And it barely has the same relevance or reach as Steam.
These "B-B-BUT STEAMS MONOPOLY CROWD" really do think we have stockholm/boot licker syndrome as if a good 60%+ of steam users didnt know how to Pirate games if we truly didnt like the service
Wasn't there just a report from a few days ago that it was closer to 300?
That's total employees at Valve. This is a subset of those that work on Steam.
It's very impressive. Although it explains why the remote streaming and controller stuff is so GD buggy.
Theres probably like 3 guys total working on them. Maybe not even full-time.
I mean that's awesome.
Ultimately they're only responsible for the steam client and the servers.
Of course there's a fee. Do they not realize how expensive it is to fileserve useless videogame data, provide versioning for that, updater systems, workshop storage, curation, promotion etc etc. . . without help?
Is there not a fee for your competing storefront? How would it fund its daily operations?
The workshop alone is already a godsend (from Lord Gaben).
There are decade old games with hundreds of thousands of mods, who's paying for all the hosting?
Has anyone tried Epic Store? It has nothing but the most barebone features to purchase a game, literally just a glorified launcher.
Right? Steam provides better service and functionality than any other PC storefront. It's ridiculous that there's so much whining about them charging for it. So what if it's a higher percentage? It's also a better service and a large audience. Whoever doesn't like it is free to go elsewhere, unlike console games that can only be sold though the manufacturer's store.
That actually makes a lot of sense given the fact that i havent heard about massive steam data centers. I suppose they just rent their servers from data centers around the world. Which actually is very suprising. I imagine at their scale making their own data centers would save them money.
Actually i just think they must subcontract a lot of their daily operation. I refuse to belive such low numbers are enough to even handle the complaints from stolen shipments and broken devices not to mention all the other complaints. It is more than enough to actually develop the platform but surely not to handle day to day operations.
I remember reading that having a version keyword in your user alias would cause issues with steam, and it was actually because it was a blocked word on CloudFlare where they store/pull a bunch of steam data from
I suspect subcontracting is how they get around the lasseiz-faire nature of employment there. There's a famously open policy where nobody tells anyone what to do.
But I imagine that policy can't extend to subcontractors. There it's "here's money, make the servers happen".
That's how you maximize profit, isn't it?
Valve is profitable because of the reputation they've built up over many years as being an incredibly consumer friendly storefront. Avoiding corporate bloat, and focusing their attention on the core aspects of their business consumers care about has allowed them to thrive where many others failed. Valve created and maintained a fantastic product. So yes.
You're right but missing an important factor
i thought it was a big team
That feels like free advertising to potential job-seekers.
If just a few staff are running the whole thing, it means they are all probably the kind that do more actual work and less politics. That means, if anyone interested in learning fast and getting good at their field were to work there, they would have the time of their life.
I infer from this that they don't hire fast learners, they hire people who are already well demonstrated experts.
Yeah, that's most probably the case.
Doesn't stop me from wanting to join though.
They're making their machine more and more efficient, storage and bandwidth just gets cheaper with time... Yet, they still need their 30% cut to make billions in profit.
Wealth redistribution when?
If it's that easy then make your own competetor and charge less. It's not like steam has exclusively deals with anyone.