Work smart not hard.
this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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Is this why they suck with CS2?
laughs, then immediately weeps in tf2
Watch the heavy update will drop any second now!
Annnyyyy second now....
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How many times has this been posted now? Genuine question: why is this such a big deal?
Genuine question: why is this such a big deal?
These are not all video game companies, but for reference:
AMD: 26,000 employees
EA: 14,000
Facebook: 84,000
Netflix: 11,000
Spotify: 9,000
Twitter: 7,500
But it’s basically a store front and they contract almost everything out. Like how many people does it take to run some servers? They don’t make games, the steam deck and the VR are the few things they’ve done. And that could be done by a couple dozen engineers and contract everything else.
Like how many employees should they have?
Twitter runs a single web application.
They also do make games.
Isn’t most of steam pages like the discussion, store page, forums, guides, workshop etc are self moderated by the publishers and developers?
And yeah they made Alex in the last decade? They make hats for old games, that’s it it seems.
they have mobile games too, and a tech demo for the steam deck, and the known hero shooter in the works
basically the people who think valve doesnt make games didnt buy into any of their expansionary market projects (mobile/vr/steam deck). They make games, just ones you dont want to play/cant play
Nah, their corporate structure legit caused them issues making games, people like to think valve as this perfect company, but it’s hella flawed and it’s peak capitalism too.
Lemmy just seems to dislike anything remotely bad being said about them, it’s odd.
Letting your employees work on what they like doesn't seem like the worst thing. It might hurt game profits but seems much nicer for the workers.
It is, but when nothing being done, no goals are being met, it would seem like a dead end job. Sure the pay is great, but you are just spinning wheels.
It also builds distrust in your fans, there’s literally memes about valve not counting to 3.
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it’s peak capitalism too.
The screenshot sounds more like "peak anarchism" to me.
Sure, but it’s capitalist because Newall takes advantage of it and reaps the benefits, the employees get burnt out and get no satisfaction since nothing ever gets completed.
Think higher up the chain maybe? I don’t see how this is even arguable, but go off if you think you need to win something here.
im not a steam stan for any reason (i rarely even buy shit off the steam store directly) but its disingenuous to say they dont make games. Id argue peak capitalism is when you force a sequel to a game that didnt necessarily need it. there are a LOT of things I can conplain about when pertaining to valve, but not making games isnt one of them. its a poor argument to make when users choose not to play what they dod make.
Its similar to Fallout and Elder Scrolls, its not that there ISNT a new fallout or elder scrolls game, its just they made ones that users mostly didnt want to play (ESO, FO:Shelter, FO:76, ES: Blades, ES: Castles) disregarding the also existing VR versions of each game.
the argument sounds very similar to thise currently complaining on the Nintendo front that Famicom Detective Club got a new game, and not other nintendo IPs like Star Fox (which had Zero, Guard and Starfox 2) in the last decade, and Fzero (which had Fzero 99). its never a matter of they didnt make games, its the matter that they didnt make games they wanted
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Wall Street would probably say 15-30,000+. I think the point of the surprise is that actually it’s possible to be massively profitable and have good products without needing massive teams of people. How many mediocre/bad AAA games have teams larger than Valve’s entire staff? More isn’t always better, sometimes it’s just more.
I haven’t read this article, because yeah, I’ve seen this same basic headline over a dozen times in the past week on Lemmy, but I think it’s a testament to what can happen when a private company doesn’t have a lot of shareholders and is run by people who just want the company to run well and be profitable. They don’t have to chase some unsustainable Wall Street expectation of x% growth every quarter.
Most of the store front is moderated by the publishers and developers, and they contract out a lot of work, maybe what, one valve employee at a server bank with the rest being contract workers?
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They don’t make games
DOTA and CS beg to differ. Spotify is a "storefront" that produces nothing but has about 25x more employees.
And valve contracts out or has the developers and publishers self moderate their own pages on Steam instead. Why is this shocking? Because a company contracts out instead of employing people and has their customers do stuff for free…?
Dude, just take the L and move on.
How does a discussion have a loser? I was adding how valve has such a low employee account since it apparently wasn’t clear to anyone currently in the discussion.
Take offense that they legit have issues publishing any games due to their corporate structure…
But I was only adding to the discussion, why do you need to “win”? They have their customers moderate their store pages and they contract out employees instead. Can you provide polite discourse to this topic without being an ass or no?
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How do you think Spotify works?
It would seem they pay more employees than contractors, that’s why their employee count is higher.
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Yep. But it also seems like people are so shocked by the data that maybe they're missing the moral of this story, too? ...sure it's impressive that Valve has done so much with such a small workforce, but I think the reason they've been able to move so quickly is because they have such a small workforce. Companies get slow because they get big...I don't care how much you tout your SAFe processes; you will always lose efficiency as you grow. It's the difference between steering a canoe vs a cruise ship...the more you grow, the more you have to fight against momentum. So, my takeaway from this is that they figured out the secret to continued success as a maturing company, and good for them.
Now, I say all of this with sincere hopes that they don't work their smaller number of employees to death and ask them to take on inappropriately burdensome workloads. Because if that's the case, they should fuck right off with the rest of their peers.
From what I understand, they basically have a very open work structure. People are free to work on what they want, when they want. They actually are against high workloads and do everything they can to prevent employee burnout.
I can't say if that extends beyond the development teams to other departments like server management, but everything I've ever seen about them says they're all just in it to have fun, make cool shit now and then, and of course make tons of money. The fact that their sales platform basically just prints money helps support that culture, obviously.
It didn’t work out
That's a bummer, but also not entirely surprising when you consider Half-Life 3...
Yeah it’s great to think letting your employees do what they want is good, which it is, but yeah everyone’s going to have their own idea and want to work on it. So who gets funding, etc.
It’s strange the person said they move fast, that’s not something I’ve ever heard in reference to steam/valve before, and so many upvotes? What’s going on here.
I think it speaks to developing for gaming over developing for infrastructure. What does it say about gaming where, a company that has a healthy attitude about work in general, has staff that prefer to work on addressing Steam bugs over working on a prestige game?
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Your point about agility is valid but Valve hasn’t veered and pivoted their way to success. Their core model and service have stayed pretty consistent for many years now. And while a cruise ship can’t steer quickly, it can move a hell of a lot more people much faster than a canoe. They are just getting a lot done with very few people and it’s 100% worth of remark. I’d love to hear more about how they do it.
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Slow Newsweek for gaming, I guess. They have had a public employee directory on their website for as long as I can remember; it's not really news.
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That’s why steam looks outdated
Counterpoint: Every other modern "flat" UI is low effort, cheap garbage. Bring back the bezels and shadows.
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8500 million in revenue and 350 employees.
Gaben owns 6 yatchs and spends 70 to 100 million maintaining them.
There is absolutely nothing that differentiates valve from the other stores front to justify this. The whole store front industry should be tightly regulated. No billionaire should exist and if you find yourself defending one, it just means they have a good marketing team.
This is having a negative impact on the industry and the only ones benefiting are Gaben, Nintendo, Microsoft, Epic, etc. it's clear collusion.
Can't wait for all the downvotes and simps coming to defend him because "Gaben isn't your average billionaire".
There is absolutely nothing that differentiates valve from the other stores front to justify this.
The "justification" is that Steam is a good storefront and others kind of blows. There's nothing stopping other companies from making good software....they just haven't.
it's clear collusion.
That's not what collusion is.... Steam doesn't sell Nintendo games and is Epic/Microsoft's rival.
Can't wait for all the downvotes and simps coming to defend him
To be clear, I'm not defending billionaires. Your talking points are just kind of baseless.
I mean they have tried, but than they get in shit for doing something different to get their foot in the door(epics free games). Valves marketing and fan base is top notch and defends them voraciously with their rose coloured glasses.
They have buggy games, they don’t update them, they are currently over run with griefers making some unplayable to any fun degree.
What’s with the passes they keep getting? As you said they get “justification” lmfao, what a fucking joke. Its capitalists defending despite you claiming you aren’t what a joke. Does musk get a pass for his space ventures? No, so why does gaben? Please explain in detail, I would love a legit answer to this.
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The product stays the same if we bring down their revenue to 1 billion, they aren't close to bankruptcy. If they took 0.5 %, Gaben would still be able to afford a yatch or two, just not 6.
Having a competitors product on your platform doesn't have anything to do with collusion. They are rivals but they don't actually compete or strive to give their customers any kind of competitive prices.
And yes, you are defending a billionaire.
If they took 0.5 %,
Took from what? Is this about the revenue share again? Stop listening to that idiot Timmy.
We know that many others take the same %% so I could say even if they took 50% they wouldn't deliver a product as good as Steam.
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Please cite a source for your claims
Did you read your own article?
In 2021, Microsoft estimated Valve's annual revenue at $6.5 billion, roughly on the same scale as EA's $7.5 billion in 2024 revenue. But Steam achieved those numbers with around 350 employees, compared to well over 13,000 people employed by EA.
The disparity highlights just how much money Valve brings in with a relatively small workforce. And a lot of that is thanks to the chunk of revenue Valve takes from every sale on Steam.
That's the indie industry getting fucked right there, but sure, drink Gabbens sweat.
The actual revenue is difficult because it's all estimation, they clearly don't want us to know and hide it. One website says 13 billion lol, and they brought it an estimated 1 billion just from Counter-strike crates. I got 8.5 from the article that was posted two days ago. Whatever it is, it's too fucking high, stop defending multi billionaires.
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Economists are praising it‘s efficiency but there are massive shortcomings when it comes to costumer support. A couple years ago I was told they have a whopping single person dedicated to matters in the german market for example. Anyone who has any idea about the german bureaucracy hellscape knows this is far from sufficient to deal with any issue whatsoever. And I suspect it‘s not running much smoother elsewhere.
Anyone who has any idea about the german bureaucracy hellscape knows this is far from sufficient to deal with any issue whatsoever.
Maybe that's contractable.
Does that matter when the bottleneck is this tiny? A single employee would have to contract, stay in contact and approve whatever they outsource. And going by some quirks with the german side of the store their usual response seems to be simply blocking german IPs from accessing whatever may cause extra bureaucratic work for them.
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costumer
I don't think valve owes the cosplay community squat.
in a serious reply to your point though:
I appreciate their line of thought - why dedicate resources for roles that don't add value to steam's development just to engage with every country's unique bureaucracy? until those countries fine valve for noncompliance it seems like an easy choice to make.
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This number doesn't seem to include support staff who iirc are contract workers so might not count as "employees".
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