These stats don’t include subcontractors and as such they’re very misleading. For example, who do you think produces the GPUs inside the steam deck? Hint: it’s not Valve.
My point being that while valve itself has only 350 employees, it subcontracts far more than that.
A better argument is who works on Proton compatibility? It’s largely not Valve employees, yet that’s a unique stack to Valve.
It annoys me too that Valve is getting most of the credit for Proton while most of the work is actually done in winehq, dxvk… I’m sure Valve pays for some development here and there, and greases some developer wheels, but the main thing they do is being a front end for consumers.
I think you’re discounting just how much they’ve invested and continue to invest in Proton/WINE. But they don’t do lion’s share of the development in-house, they mostly just pay devs to work on it, and yes, manage the FE in Steam. They’re still a massive positive force for change in Windows game compatibility on Linux, and we’d be nowhere near where we are today without their investment.
