Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Leaked payroll data show how much Valve pays staff and how few people it employs

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 98 posts

Re: Leaked payroll data show how much Valve pays staff and how few people it employs

#71

Post by shpx »

lionkor wrote: post #36

> Valve employed just 79 people for Steam, which is one of the most influential gaming storefronts on the planet. It might just be me, but that actually seems pretty reasonable. What I've seen a lot is companies, during growth, accepting less-than-ideal candidates, maybe without a good onboarding, which then end up as deadweight in the worst case, and underperformers in the best case. This, combined with a tendency t…

I've been joking that Steam on macOS is so bad that there must be no one at Valve who has used it because there's no way you ship such brazenly slow software knowingly, but with 79 people this is actually probably true.

Re: Leaked payroll data show how much Valve pays staff and how few people it employs

#72

Post by pbhjpbhj »

Aerroon wrote: post #34
bobthepanda wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is Epic and Itch. The problem is that Steam for all its faults is DRM, anti-cheat, and a well functioning store rolled all in one. Most of the alternate stores are bad in one way or another; Epic launched without a cart, and it still doesn’t have user text reviews. Itch had to redo its whole UI after that one bundle they did that had thousands of games in it. Notably Valve doesn’t really use its position to mak…

There's also Nutaku that's supposedly as big as Steam (they are focused on NSFW games). Imo Epic is the only competitor to Steam that tries to offer a similar service to Steam. It's just popular to hate on it among pc gamers. Many people cite a lack of features on Epic's store as the reason, eg no forum feature, but then turn around and decry Steam forums as the worst place on the internet. I don't think the problem…

Epic games seems to lack even basic functionality. I just added Win11 as triple boot on one computer, the kids have loads of games already installed from win10 in a tertiary drive ... on the website it says the solution to them not having a facility to tell their installer/launcher which folder to use is to reinstall all the games.

Now, once you open Epic you can ignore it, use Explorer open the game folders and launch the games and they run. So it looks like they literally need a way to change a config file to avoid re-downloading 100s of GB of games.

I find it literally crazy. They even scatter .egstore files around so actually scanning for and adding games to the library automatically should be easy.

Steam makes the same task easy, and why wouldn't it it's pretty rudimentary for an installer/launcher to have a easy way for you to tell it where your downloaded games are.

Oh, and the instructions for reinstalling Epic _launcher_ say to just re- download all your games. They're insane.

YMMV.

Re: Leaked payroll data show how much Valve pays staff and how few people it employs

#73

Post by stryan »

wiseowise wrote: post #30

At this point Valve should open source all of their games if they’re not planning to develop new ones.

They've released five games in the past 4 years[0] and have another one in active closed testing[1], along with keeping DOTA2 running with major game changes and mini-games[2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Valve_games

[1] Random article about it: https://gamerant.com/deadlock-gameplay-footage-valve-leak-6v... .

[2] DOTA's had massive patches recently, including adding a new attribute, expanding the map, and redoing every hero to have innate abilities and a choice of passive effects. They've also been adding some pretty big PvE/external content events between Aghanim's Labyrinth and the current Crownfall battle pass (which just added a surprisingly fleshed out fighting game mini-game).

Re: Leaked payroll data show how much Valve pays staff and how few people it employs

#74

Post by jimjimjim »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #8
bongoman42 wrote: post #7

The real scandal is that it is 2024 and people still don't understand how redaction works.

The real scandal is that PDF Software is still stupid enough to not notice that a user is trying to do a redaction and offer to do it correctly. This is the programmer’s fault, not the user’s. It’s not a huge bar either. If the user has set a background color to solid black, and is filling black text with it, the intent is pretty obvious.

Redaction is not simple. What should the software do if the user's black box is drawn over an image, some text and part of a spline on a page? Modify the image and recompress it even if it's lossy?, find the text run and remove the obscured characters (what about a half covered letter?), somehow modify spline and possibly replace it with several smaller ones if the redaction is in the middle of it? All while taking into account any transforms that have been applied to the page. Also what if the black box is over part of a pdf form? Is it just the appearance that gets redacted or the form data (which is separate). Same questions if the black box is drawn over annotations. And what about other page content like embedded videos or 3d content, good luck redacting those. But if you only redact some things the user might then justifiably expect it to redact everything.

Re: Leaked payroll data show how much Valve pays staff and how few people it employs

#75

Post by memco »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #8
bongoman42 wrote: post #7

The real scandal is that it is 2024 and people still don't understand how redaction works.

The real scandal is that PDF Software is still stupid enough to not notice that a user is trying to do a redaction and offer to do it correctly. This is the programmer’s fault, not the user’s. It’s not a huge bar either. If the user has set a background color to solid black, and is filling black text with it, the intent is pretty obvious.

I know at least Preview on MacOS has this feature now: if you try to put a black bar over text it tells you this isn’t secure and offers to redact for you using a method that both visually replaces all characters and removes the embedded text underneath It is non-destructive until saved meaning you have a window in which to make changes before the data is gone.

Re: Leaked payroll data show how much Valve pays staff and how few people it employs

#76

Post by blackhawkC17 »

metadat wrote: post #2

Where does all the money go if it isn't being reinvested into the business? Are the massive profits immediately syphoned out by the execs and owners? It's interesting there isn't a well-known real competitor to Steam (the Blizzard and Ubisoft stores, etc, don't count, because so few external parties publish there). My gut says the lack of reinvestment could be someone else's opportunity, especially considering many o…

Gabe Newell has a nice superyacht. Part of the profits surely went there :)

https://www.superyachtfan.com/yacht/rocinante/

Re: Leaked payroll data show how much Valve pays staff and how few people it employs

#77

Post by ryandrake »

lionkor wrote: post #36

> Valve employed just 79 people for Steam, which is one of the most influential gaming storefronts on the planet. It might just be me, but that actually seems pretty reasonable. What I've seen a lot is companies, during growth, accepting less-than-ideal candidates, maybe without a good onboarding, which then end up as deadweight in the worst case, and underperformers in the best case. This, combined with a tendency t…

I've never seen these companies (that are supposedly everywhere) that have all this "deadweight". Every company I've worked at has had 4X to 10X more work than enough staff to do the work. We beg for headcount to hire more so we can actually do what we set out to do, but we never have enough. I guess these places exist, but I've never really seen it myself.

Re: Leaked payroll data show how much Valve pays staff and how few people it employs

#78

Post by jbernsteiniv »

pyb wrote: post #58

Hardware engineers making half of what software engineers make. A reminder of the stark difference between the two job markets.

It's not just the people designing the hardware but also those maintaining it. I work in an "Infrastructure Engineer" position (I hate that since it also correlates with construction but mine is strictly expensive servers in data centers) and I make less money than the people running the virtual infrastructure even though that all runs on top of the machines I manage, lol.

I once had an internal customer open an on call event to ask why one of their machines was running so slowly. I said "it's because one of the DIMMs has thrown about 30,000 correctable errors within the past month". I was able to correlate that by mapping the EDAC label for the DIMM recorded in /var/log/messages and some gzipped archives of the aforementioned log file.

Of course I deal with CPU, memory, motherboards, GPUs, add-on NICs (OCP or PCIe), storage controllers (HBAs mostly, some RAID controllers), BMCs, and of course I also have to evaluate the link width of PCIe bridges interconnecting all the PCIe devices.

Re: Leaked payroll data show how much Valve pays staff and how few people it employs

#79

Post by metadat »

blackhawkC17 wrote: post #76
metadat wrote: post #2

Where does all the money go if it isn't being reinvested into the business? Are the massive profits immediately syphoned out by the execs and owners? It's interesting there isn't a well-known real competitor to Steam (the Blizzard and Ubisoft stores, etc, don't count, because so few external parties publish there). My gut says the lack of reinvestment could be someone else's opportunity, especially considering many o…

Gabe Newell has a nice superyacht. Part of the profits surely went there :) https://www.superyachtfan.com/yacht/rocinante/

Think he named The Rocinante after the one from The Expanse?

Knowing that a not insignificant part of the thousands I've spent on Steam over the years went to fund that.. isn't a great feeling.

Re: Leaked payroll data show how much Valve pays staff and how few people it employs

#80

Post by c-hendricks »

lionkor wrote: post #36

> Valve employed just 79 people for Steam, which is one of the most influential gaming storefronts on the planet. It might just be me, but that actually seems pretty reasonable. What I've seen a lot is companies, during growth, accepting less-than-ideal candidates, maybe without a good onboarding, which then end up as deadweight in the worst case, and underperformers in the best case. This, combined with a tendency t…

> steam is big, but it's not a product so complex you'd need over 100 people to maintain it

I dunno, I think Steam is pretty complex:

- The steam store (credit card processing, optimizing search, review bombs, gift buying, features around various ways to hide games you've purchased, marketplace)

- Workshop (Uploading, managing people's subscriptions, SDKs)

- Cloud Saves

- Remote Play, works remotely without any port mapping (so they're running a service for that) (clients for macOS, Windows, iOS/iPadOS/tvOS, Android)

- Controller Mapping (DualShock 4, Dual Sense, various Nintendo Controllers, Xbox controllers, pretty intense UI)

- New Video Recording with SDK for games to integrate with

- Friends / Chat

- Broadcasting games

- The client itself, for Windows, macOS, Linux)

And a whole lot more (forums, profile customization, guides)

Post reply on HN