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

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

#81

Post by csande17 »

c-hendricks wrote: post #80
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…

According to the article, Valve is in fact currently maintaining all those features with a team of ~80 people. So this is a good opportunity to improve your understanding of the number of people it takes to maintain software.

One thing Valve seems to understand better than most big tech companies is that once a product/feature is done, you don't need the same size team to maintain it. A lot of parts of Steam have been functionally unchanged for the last few years and just... keep working. The people who worked on Cloud Saves have presumably moved on to something else, instead of entering a Google-esque cycle of pointless Cloud Saves feature launches and deprecations.

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

#82

Post by c-hendricks »

csande17 wrote: post #81
c-hendricks wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

According to the article, Valve is in fact currently maintaining all those features with a team of ~80 people. So this is a good opportunity to improve your understanding of the number of people it takes to maintain software. One thing Valve seems to understand better than most big tech companies is that once a product/feature is done, you don't need the same size team to maintain it. A lot of parts of Steam have bee…

Oh, at my day job we are about 5 engineers maintaining and adding features to support thousands of users, I'm aware of how few people are actually needed to maintain and build software.

My objection was to the phrase "Steam is not complex", which I guess wasn't the posters point.

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

#83

Post by xingped »

ryandrake wrote: post #77
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.

Clearly you haven't worked in any particularly big companies. The whole ship is deadweight.

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

#84

Post by solarkraft »

mejutoco wrote: post #38
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 can empathize with the feeling but this is the case in many many contexts. Reading the intent of a user without a clear mental model of software is difficult, sometimes impossible. I know no os that changes the format of an image when a user changes the file extension, for example, which is a pretty similar situation.

The criticism is that it’s not done even when reading the user’s intent is plenty possible, like in this case.

(how bad UIs are is generally an insult to all the amazing engineering behind them)

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

#85

Post by awwaiid »

dangrossman wrote: post #3
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…

At $1.3 million per employee in payroll expenses, it seems like much of the profits are being distributed to the employees that work there.

Iiuc the payroll comes out before profit.

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

#86

Post by rasz »

shpx wrote: post #71
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.

Apple screwing you over twice will do that to your products targeting Apple users.

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

#87

Post by Aerroon »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #72
Aerroon wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 laun…

I agree, but this is a small thing. It doesn't make or break your use of the software.

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

#88

Post by Aerroon »

bobthepanda wrote: post #62
Aerroon wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think that a lot of features on Steam don’t need to be copied, but I think Steam does have a giant moat in terms of actually useful features. Steam for example, allows user submitted ratings with explainer text. This is huge for online shopping decisions. Steam Workshop is easy to integrate mod distribution for games. Etc.

>Steam for example, allows user submitted ratings with explainer text. This is huge for online shopping decisions.

I don't know anyone who actually relies on Steam ratings/reviews to make purchasing decisions. I've always assumed that rating systems on the platform that is selling you the product are not trustworthy. But then again, I find reviews for media to generally be useless.

>Steam Workshop is easy to integrate mod distribution for games.

That's a developer feature rather than a player one though.

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

#89

Post by bobthepanda »

Aerroon wrote: post #88
bobthepanda wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that a lot of features on Steam don’t need to be copied, but I think Steam does have a giant moat in terms of actually useful features. Steam for example, allows user submitted ratings with explainer text. This is huge for online shopping decisions. Steam Workshop is easy to integrate mod distribution for games. Etc.

> Steam for example, allows user submitted ratings with explainer text. This is huge for online shopping decisions. I don't know anyone who actually relies on Steam ratings/reviews to make purchasing decisions. I've always assumed that rating systems on the platform that is selling you the product are not trustworthy. But then again, I find reviews for media to generally be useless. > Steam Workshop is easy to integr…

Steam reviews can be useful depending on their content and their general direction, particularly if they mention specific things they do or don’t like, and there are consistent things popping up. Game devs are not flush with money and I’ve never seen a flood of suspiciously positive reviews.

Steam also has the features to do social proof of reviews. The reviews contain metadata about if the person got the game for free, and if you click the profile associated with it, you can see all the games a user has played and their achievement progress, which can help signal if they are a real gamer, how far they've gotten in the game they reviewed, but also how far they get in other games they've played to check that they're not a sock puppet.

This has enough value that Epic displays a star rating that is allegedly user generated, but because it doesn't indicate who is doing the reviews, and there is no text, their star rating is a lot more suspect.

---

Modding support is also a player feature. Official, well supported modding can make or break a game, and Steam facilitates quite a lot in that regard; Nexus, as an alternative, is ad supported and caps download speeds for mods unless you shell out for a premium membership.

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

#90

Post by bathtub365 »

rasz wrote: post #86
shpx wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple screwing you over twice will do that to your products targeting Apple users.

How did Apple screw them over twice?
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