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?
More along the lines of a Coca Cola.
“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.”
Downvotes don’t make me wrong.
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.
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.
If any digital game store deserved to be sue, it’s Nintendo hand down. That’s the real monopoly store with a “fuck you because we can” attitude.
Why is this getting posted so often?
This is a “they are hoarding all the profits” “they’re not open to stock exchange” “why I can’t have a piece if this cake, it’s unfair” kind of news.
Pure pressure politics.
Who should they share it with?
Just me. Don’t worry, I’ll do great things with it. Trust me, bro.
You sound confident. Like a person I can trust.
gives confidence too. like some sort of superhero that has confidence powers. you could name him, uh… let me think…
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.
Because Epic Games is really hoping to turn people against steam any way they can other than actually improving their service or morals.
And how… is this supposed to help that?
By making it seem that Steam is raking in money and uh, money bad?
This is so silly. Do people think hosting thousands of games and having thousands of users is cheap?
I mean that’s awesome.
Ultimately they’re only responsible for the steam client and the servers.
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 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
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
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
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.)
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.
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.
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.
The report says that Valve has ~350 employees total, and of those employees only 80 actually work on Steam as a storefront. The rest are working on their games and hardware.
So they have people working on their games? HL-3 confirmed!
They have other games in the works. I’m in the alpha or beta now? Of their overwatch like called deadlock.
Who the fuck cares what’s with this constant desire to try and shit on steam
Shit on? This is some baller ass shit – What is the rev per employee a billion dollars!!!
They’ve touted before that they may be the most profitable company per employee on earth. They make a few billion in profit per year with a payroll of a few hundred employees.
Must be – I can’t think of anyone else that could come close unless you count Berkshire Hathaway or something
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. But I very much doubt such information exists.
I definitely didn’t interpret this as shitting on Steam. In fact, the opposite.
How is this even shitting on them? It’s impressive af
The way the headline is phrased suggests a disapproving tone.
Explain.
How so? It’s about as neutral as can be.
Anything not directly biased towards my interests are against my interests.
;p
Just more seems to be a lot of posts on this topic and they are filled with anti steam crap
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.
They meant the other companies tried competing and failed so they’re pushing these anti-valve lawsuits and articles.
80 people who are doing a bang-up job, i might add.
These numbers keep getting smaller with every headline. Tomorrow it says that Steam runs off of Gabens private NAS.
Gaben isn’t actually one person. Gaben is a conglomerate.
Gaben is a state of mind
It’s the level beyond zen.
Budda statue is based on Gaben confirmed!
Budda is just a Garry’s Mod asset flip.
Is it like Negan from The Walking Dead? They’re all Gaben.
Because other articles cite about 350 (heh, inb4 three-fiddy) for the whole of Valve. This is just Steam.
Failure of larger companies to make a competitive alternative to steam is not anticompetitive behavior on the part of Valve
Yeah who TF are their lawyers? Anticompetitive behavior is just that—there has to be actions taken. And steam doesn’t have exclusivity agreements so IDK what they’re gonna argue.
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!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.
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
Seems like a good example of how running a company for the shareholders doesn’t produce a a better product after all.
Product becomes the byproduct. Dividends and massive returns are the #1 priority.
B-b-b-bingo
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.
shareholders … worship money
Well, that literally is the only reason to become a shareholder, right?
I mean, technically you’re participating in the management of the company and can influence decisions such as environmental benefits, but it feels like that only happens when there’s secondary benefits that also improve profit.
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
