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.

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?

Okay I shouldn’t have taken a shot at their game making ability, but it legit fucking sucks and they acknowledge it, people bash them for it sometimes, take it easy guys.

None of these companies are comparable other than they’re also tech…

Hint: none of those companies need all of those employees.

EA is not video game company?

Weird take, in valve more money is saved for Gabe himself (hence his half a dozen yachts….), while on the other hand, the companies with more employees spend more on giving other people money.

So who’s hoarding using your logic? The company with 10 bil in revenue and 200 employees, or the company with the same revenue and 20000 employees…? Because to me it seems ones doing more for citizens at large than the other lining one persons pocket far More.

They are developing a game at the moment, Deadlock. Lots of footage and a dev build leaked a few months ago.

Well that’s why they actually do right by their customers. That said I definitely agree

There are plenty of private companies that are shitty too. It definitely helps being private (and maybe is a requirement?), but you also have to have the right owners for private companies to be good.

Steam DB has a pretty decent search. It’s not SQL but the filters are a bit better.

I know how you feel tho - so few consumer orgs give us an advanced search worth it’s salt. I want to have (x AND y) OR z, or maybe x AND (y OR z)… Not whichever specific combination was preordained for me.

I still can’t figure out how their search filters work.

It always blocks games with violence whether I have all filters checked or unchecked

My reference to free market is only a means of saying customers choose steam because of its offerings not that they have too.

I agree it would be nice if they charged less. However do we know their full PNL/balance sheet? People just keep taking revenue/employees as if employees are the only overhead.

They provide the servers, and do have an rde cost for development for services we discussed like cloud saves, control support etc. if people have this much energy over it attack pharmaceutical for there insane mark ups that would drive way more positive social change. But the people driving are mostly trying to make more money by cutting there publishing expenses through steam. I’m sure psn and Xbox also take 25 to 30percent cuts.

They also championed low publishing costs of only 100 dollars to list a game. I don’t know enough to speak to their update charges though. Hell psn been known to charge 25k for visibility in top of their 30% cut and there are no other market options Reference

Everyone focuses here cause developers and publishers want more of this cut and to me seem to try to push steam into regulator cross hairs as a way to force the changes they have failed to negotiate.

I would also point out brick and mortar sellers also take 15 to 20% cut and then also charge for storage, disposal, fulfillment, return on and on. Amazon does the same. It’s the nature of a market place. Reference

Overall it doesn’t make sense to me as a community that we attack our best example of what a game market place should be.

justifying anything by saying they’re successful in a free market is really iffy

The important part is why they’re successful; unlike many companies which try to lock customers in and take advantage of them as much as possible, Steam/Valve try to build a good product at a reasonable price, and trust that it’ll bring them customers.

And look at that, it does.

Oh for sure they are there for a profit. But as the best example in the industry let’s not unnecessarily attack them. Imagine how much more money they make if they did go public and how awful it would be for all of us.

They kind of have to be about making money. No company survives by putting the needs of the customer above all else, unfortunately.

Luckily steamless is piss easy to use because Steams “DRM” is only meant to be preventative. As in, you’re playing it on steam for the community, workshop, cloud saves, per game notes, control scheme setups, etc etc.

That’s kind of why they are successful though, right? They were the ones that figured out how to supply games digitally for a profit, which required a way to prevent people from sharing the product for free. This was previously done with CD keys, but the advent of the internet rendered that mostly ineffective.

The way I see it, Steam having DRM is Valve’s way of giving publishers and devs that choice, and said choice just makes Steam more likely to stick around for the future, which makes the biggest drawback of DRM (losing all your games) less likely.

You can play: Half-Life 1: Source Half-Life 2 Half-Life 2: Episode One Half-Life 2: Episode Two All with steam closed. Original half life expansions aside, your take is senile. I suppose alyx could’ve done without it.

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And the fact that they can just decide to take your games away from you by deleting your account?

Having an AS does not make you an ISP. It just means you have a public AS, which you can use to peer with providers on the Internet, if you have an agreement to peer.

What’s Mckinsey, a type of cheese? PWC? Is that a firearms company?

Most of the support staff is their customers and users actually.

It’s not users that process refund request, recover your account if e.g. you’ve lost your 2FA method, or any of the other innumerable things you might need to contact Steam support for. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to include the staff that do this as part of their workforce.

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.

Yeah same. I don’t play a ton, mostly on the deck,. And I also avoid interaction with other people on their platform. But I’ve never had an issue.

They could create a new flag for Abandoned Early Access games. If an Early Access game hasn’t been updated in a long time, that could trigger an automatic email to the publisher saying “Hey your game hasn’t been updated in a long time and could be changed from Early Access to Abandoned Early Access. Consider updating the game or store page to keep Early Access status. If you would like to switch to Abandoned Early Access, you can ignore this message and it will automatically update in two weeks or you can manually change the status on your game’s Steam page.” Wouldn’t really need more employees to handle this unless the current employees are all too busy to implement something like it.

They could easily prevent devs that abandoned an early access title from launching another one. They could check if the devs have a reasonable business plan and are able to fulfill their promises. They could vet them and check if they did manage to release some games. And so on. It is not impossible and would help us gamers, because nobody wants abandoned games.