Valve's Court Documents Leaked: Everything We Know

Valve's success is simply stunning. On a $ per employee basis, Steam almost defies belief.

Sources:

[DivinityOfBLaze]

The reason Valve staff can be so efficient is likely that theyre veterans who know what theyre doing. I work in software dev. We are inefficienct. Why? Layoffs and departures. People come in, look at codebase, have no idea what theyre even looking at, spend months trying to get to know it, get laid off, repeat. Meanwhile someone who knows the codebase can get things done in a few hours instead of a few days or weeks. I also love it when someone asks questions about how a thing works and the only guy who knew was laid off. Thats how you achieve negative efficiency.

[mstrzg]

The real problem with steam is that as soon as Gabe is gone it will go to shit

[Thor]

What the Staff cost shows is that even the "lower paid" people get about $500k/year. That's pretty damn good.

[sakaraist]

EA : best we can do is an unpaid internship and a sick break room.
Steam : How about a million a year?

[rb]

I'm from an developing country, and up until a good chunk of the 00s legitimately buying computer games was virtually unheard of here because no one could afford it. Quite literally everyone just played pirated games. Most people would get their games for cheap from shady vendors who distributed pirated copies of games, and they basically had no guarantee they weren't installing malware in their computer. Valve pretty much put us on the map as a market with regional pricing, and I'll always be grateful.

[Shadow_Liger-iolg]

What causes me to laugh, is If Valve eased off their revenue cut to the lowest they could tolerate, then THAT would truly be monopolistic behavior as no one else could compete with how efficient they are.

[noflashbang]

If you haven’t looked at Valves internal organization you should. It’s one of the few “flat” companies. There is no hierarchy. No bosses. Everyone just contributes to the projects where they can make the most impact. Who sets those projects? Well if you have an idea and can build a team (take resources from other projects) it gets worked on. This helps explain why Valve is so unpredictable but also runs incredibly lean. No bureaucratic bloat.

[SkyeRequiem]

Is nobody going to acknowledge that steam is paying their average employees around a million dollars a year, with the lowest paid average team being Hardware at around 500k per employee?

[Thor]

Just remember:
Valve does NOT set the prices. They just take 30% of the price the Developer/Publisher sets.

[marcusjohansson]

As a linux user I am very grateful for the money Valve put into proton.
Without this situation, my gaming experience would most likely not be possible on linux and I would still be forced to keep a windows installation.

[Alte.Kameraden]

Private Ownership in a nutshell. Best companies often end up being private business. Instead of those large Publicly Traded Corporations.

[drealms]

And they earned it, Valve is so much better consumer wise compared to MS, Sony, Nintendo and Epic. Wake up execs, and be more pro-sumer if you want to compete.

[MersenneTwister]

I can install a game I bought 20 years ago on a completely different operating system and play it in about 5 minutes whenever I want. Thanks, Gaben. I hope Valve never goes public.

[RobedLogic]

Steam doesn't really have a monopoly, they're just the best service, so people use it.

[Ehh.....]

Damn Valve cant be the only US company that actually pays its staff well, Can it?

[Nickmacpaddywhack]

Steam does not have a monopoly. There are at least a dozen other platforms for people to buy games digitally. It's just that most people prefer steam over the other options. Meanwhile no one is doing anything about the livenation/ticketmaster monopoly.

[The-Urban-Goose]

In case anyone is interested, the average Valve employee salary in 2021 was as follows:
Admin - $4.514.273
Games - $1.062.740
Hardware - $431.862
Steam - $967.678

[reactionaryprinciplegaming]

I'm a Linux user and, thanks to steam, now I can just buy a modern game, install it and run it, 9 times out of 10, with no hassle at all. If a game is not on steam, it might as well not exist for me.

[urazz]

Big thing Tim Sweeny needs to know if he truly wants to compete with Steam is to offer cheaper prices than Steam in general and try to have your store/launcher be at least close to Steam in terms of quality. Why would I buy a game on the Epic Game store for the same price as it is on Steam and have to use a crappier launcher as well, and why do I personally care that studios/publishers get more money?

[skeezixcodejedi]

The 'funny' thing to me is.. Valve is less of a monopoly now than ever, perhaps; ie: EA store and GOG and such are all doing pretty well existing. Go back 10 years and it was pretty much a lock hold for Valve.