Comment by Kecessa@sh.itjust.works on Court documents show that not only is Valve a fraction the size [only 336 employees in 2021] of companies like EA or Ubisoft, it's smaller than a lot of triple-A developers

Don’t need that many employees to run a store, programmers/IT and marketing and you’re good to go. Employees wouldn’t count contractors either so they probably have a lot more “employees” than that.

Not only that, Valve has done a TON of work to outsource as much of the process of running Steam off to the users and developers. Self-publishing, a minimum of manual moderation, automated greenlight processes, automated ratings, database tags, controller configs…

Their entire business model is to make money with as little effort as possible. I’ve been saying for ages that people vastly underestimate how ruthlessly profitable their business is. We didn’t have the numbers, but we roughly knew this is what was going on.

Gabe owns six yachts, people should always keep that in mind when praising him, he’s not the friend of the average Joe, he just realized there’s profit to be made by not pissing people off, but he’s still making enough profit from us to be a billionaire while the majority of people live paycheck to paycheck.

he just realized there’s profit to be made by not pissing people off

It’s weird that I’m nostalgic for the good old days when the ultra rich understood that

he just realized there’s profit to be made by not pissing people off

I’m okay with this. Same deal with Costco’s founders and CEOs. It’d be nice if billionaires didn’t exist, but they do, and most of them made their profits while pissing everyone off.

I’ll praise the ones that at least try to do some “good” for people. Even if their “good” is “Let’s make obscene amounts of money by charging affordable prices and being the ‘good guy’ in the industry”.

I’m not okay with this because it incentivizes companies and influencers to work together to lower people’s standards.

People are proud to accept garbage these days.

I ask genuinely – what alternative do we have?

I mean, in this case, yarrrr. but in other cases, i think, probably also yarrrr. but like, physically.

That’s the thing though, they’re still overcharging you and 70$+ isn’t affordable prices for a game, you’ve just been brainwashed into thinking that your money is worth less than it is because a big chunk of it goes to enrich a few people.

Valve gets 30% for distributing it, the publisher takes another 10 to 20%, add other fees and 50% of what you’re spending goes to the people doing the actual work, that means that Valve gets 60% of what the dev gets for doing barely anything.

overcharging you and 70$+ isn’t affordable prices for a game

The last game I bought on Steam was less than $2 after tax.

Most games I buy on Steam are less than $20. The most expensive game I’ve ever bought on Steam was probably about $40. And I’ve done that maybe once.

And even at $70, games are cheaper now than they’ve ever been, adjusting for inflation. They’re also generally much more expensive to produce.

Just because they’re cheaper doesn’t mean you don’t get overcharged at the end of the day, what kind of mentality is that?

Holy shit Gabe Newell is a billionaire (it’s just at the second paragraph). This does change my view of him and steam. So uncool.

The dude’s the CEO of the most successful online gaming platform ever. Yeah, he’s gonna be a billionaire.

He was a billionaire before valve even existed.

Where did you hear that?

He early joined Microsoft and probably had some stock but he left by 1996 so I hardly doubt that made him a real billionaire, (especially given the time).

What did you expect? He owns Valve who has the place to buy video games on PC with Steam.
But you’ll be hard pressed to find a store front that is not owned by a billionaire or some publicly traded corporation.

cough GoG cough

I’m agreeing with you, btw.

GoG

or some publicly traded corporation

CD Projekt is a publicly traded corporation.

I expected him to be cool, I guess

people should always keep that in mind when praising him

Why?? Good for him, stop being so envious. It’s thanks to Valve I started to buy games instead of pirate them anyway. Good prices and good practices.

A billionaire from a game industry is not the same as a billionaire from a real state company or a bank. Games are not a basic need.

Nah, a billionaire is a billionaire. There’s still people being exploited to get that much money. I don’t completely disagree, though - at least Gaben didn’t make Valve completely evil and yeah, it’s better than fucking up the property market for generations of people.

Billionaires shouldn’t exist. The government should regulate all these stores and force a max of 5%. They are clearly colluding and aren’t competing in good faith.

This is having a negative impact on the industry, a lot of indie studios would have an easier time surviving if they weren’t bled dry by what essentially is a soft monopoly.

Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony and Steam are all guilty yet you would never defend any of the other ones. Steam spends a lot of money convincing everyone Gaben is just a really cool dude and not your average billionaire.

Steam spends a lot of money convincing everyone Gaben is just a really cool dude and not your average billionaire.

Or maybe he is a really cool dude…

Gaben owns 6 yatchs and spends between 70 million and 100 million a year maintaining them. He’s in the same club as Bezos and the rest.

Could use a few to develop a new linux distribution for entirely new markets and use cases, design and manufacture innovative cutting edge consumer hardware, and count to three.

I’m surprised they didn’t really try to make Steam OS a real distro for regular PCs, but at the same time there’s no real money to be made…

They tried that first, it didn’t go so well.

Yeah, that’s why I said they didn’t really tried, the distro isn’t even distributed anymore

Honestly it would probably be worth it as a flagship project to keep their staff engineers excited about something.

I know they earn piles and piles of money, but some people just quit when they’ve got enough cash, so you need an other sort of carrot.

Exactly, proton was much more usefull

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Court documents show that not only is Valve a fraction the size [only 336 employees in 2021] of companies like EA or Ubisoft, it's smaller than a lot of triple-A developers (www.pcgamer.com)

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