Valve Runs Its Massive PC Gaming Ecosystem With Only About 350 Employees (arstechnica.com) 83
Valve had its employee and payroll data leaked through a poorly redacted document in an antitrust lawsuit in May, offering a rare glimpse into the company's small but impactful workforce over the years. As first noticed by SteamDB's Pavel Djundik, Valve's significant influence in PC gaming transactions has been maintained by just a few hundred employees. Kyle Orland reports via Ars Technica: It's striking to consider just how small Valve is compared to other major players in the game industry. In 2021, Microsoft estimated Valve's annual revenue at $6.5 billion, roughly on the same scale as EA's $7.5 billion in 2024 revenue. But Steam achieved those numbers with around 350 employees, compared to well over 13,000 people employed by EA. The disparity highlights just how much money Valve brings in with a relatively small workforce. And a lot of that is thanks to the chunk of revenue Valve takes from every sale on Steam. The dominant PC gaming marketplace has seen a massive increase in the number of annual game releases since 2012 or so, thanks to initiatives like Steam Greenlight and Steam Direct.
Yet, surprisingly, the size of the "Steam" department inside Valve has shrunk in recent years, from a peak of 142 employees in 2015 down to just 79 in 2021. From the outside, having just 79 employees keeping track of more than 11,000 Steam releases in 2021 is a pretty incredible ratio. Some readers may also be surprised that Valve's "Games" department has represented a majority of the company's headcount since 2003. That has remained true (though to a lesser extent) even in more recent years, as Valve's output of new games has become much more occasional. It seems likely a large number of those Games department employees are devoted to ultra-popular Valve games like Dota 2 and Counter-Strike 2, which enjoy tens of millions of players and need significant support work.
The leaked data also shows the slow rise of Valve's small Hardware department, which started with just three employees in 2011 as the company began work on its doomed Steam Machines initiative. Transitioning into the Valve Index era in the late 2010s, the hardware department still represented just a few dozen people and a paltry 3 to 4 percent of the company's annual payroll. By the time we hit 2021 and the run-up to the Steam Deck, the Hardware division still makes up just 12 percent of Valve's small total headcount. Looking back, it's impressive that such a small team was able to create a portable gaming device that quickly spawned a whole micro-industry of imitators. We can only hope the Hardware team got a little more employee support in the wake of the Steam Deck's market success.
Yet, surprisingly, the size of the "Steam" department inside Valve has shrunk in recent years, from a peak of 142 employees in 2015 down to just 79 in 2021. From the outside, having just 79 employees keeping track of more than 11,000 Steam releases in 2021 is a pretty incredible ratio. Some readers may also be surprised that Valve's "Games" department has represented a majority of the company's headcount since 2003. That has remained true (though to a lesser extent) even in more recent years, as Valve's output of new games has become much more occasional. It seems likely a large number of those Games department employees are devoted to ultra-popular Valve games like Dota 2 and Counter-Strike 2, which enjoy tens of millions of players and need significant support work.
The leaked data also shows the slow rise of Valve's small Hardware department, which started with just three employees in 2011 as the company began work on its doomed Steam Machines initiative. Transitioning into the Valve Index era in the late 2010s, the hardware department still represented just a few dozen people and a paltry 3 to 4 percent of the company's annual payroll. By the time we hit 2021 and the run-up to the Steam Deck, the Hardware division still makes up just 12 percent of Valve's small total headcount. Looking back, it's impressive that such a small team was able to create a portable gaming device that quickly spawned a whole micro-industry of imitators. We can only hope the Hardware team got a little more employee support in the wake of the Steam Deck's market success.
What most of us in tech already know ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, the top few percent of performers are incredibly more productive than the rest if they are allowed to actually make and execute technical decisions.
Twitter/X is another recent example: it runs just as badly as it ever did with 80-90% fewer people working there.
Re: What most of us in tech already know ... (Score:3)
Twitter's problem was always a management issue and not a staff issue.
Re: (Score:2)
Ah, but then lay off all the people who had a useful function, and retain the useless chaff who were good at ass kissing. The Twitter/X story!
Re: What most of us in tech already know ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Job One of management is recruiting and retaining the best people they can
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
So ... you claim incompetent management hired a bunch of competent workers?
...
Job One of management is recruiting and retaining the best people they can
For as cheap as possible.
The latter often means you dont get the former.
Re: (Score:2)
Job One of management is recruiting and retaining the best people they can ...
That is certainly the right theory; however, the typical boss is only going to keep people that are compliant to that boss's management style.
In other words, you get what you test for and loyalty is a very important test for many bosses.
Re: (Score:2)
That's a bad boss those. More typical is that a boss wants employees that make him look good. And you make the boss look good by getting work done. So bosses do keep around the assholes they hate if they can't get anyone else productive as replacements.
Re: (Score:1)
So ... you claim incompetent management hired a bunch of competent workers?
Struggling with cause and effect is insightful ?
Re: (Score:2)
Twitter isn't really social media like Facebook is it's just a microblog site. You don't go there to interconnect with people you go there to consu
Re: (Score:1)
Too bad he missed, amiright?
Re: (Score:2)
Until some big market in Europe decides they don't want the US products, and then people end up whining about how they'd all be speaking German if it wasn't for them, so they should buy our shitty stuff and and be happy about that! We see emerging economies turning towards China and start whining about how that's totally unfair, all the while calling those economies shit holes. You can't insult the world and expect it to keep trading with you.
Re: (Score:1)
Well, they did have an entire store room full of "STAY WOKE" t-shirts.
Re: (Score:3)
Twitter/X is another recent example: it runs just as badly as it ever did with 80-90% fewer people working there.
It's still a shit site but it does have way more downtime and way less moderation enforcement since it became Musk's 4chan, even with greatly pared-back rules to enforce.
Re: (Score:2)
Also since it's private we don't really know how it's doing financially. Have to imagine less overhead but also less revenue, which is a decision you can make being private.
In a weird way I can respect that if he wants to run the site his way despite taking a bath on it (which is what I imagine is happening) but at that point of wealth you can trat a $40B purchase as a hobby, like a normal person get's into woodworking.
Even to keep it on topic Gabe Newell apparently enjoys machining and has a million dolla
Re:What most of us in tech already know ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Buying Twitter was one of the biggest head scratchers I've seen in a long line of really weird interweb company decisions over the last 30 years. I guess I'm with you on having a sort of bemused respect for someone putting that much money where their mouth is.
The thing that pissed off the Bay Area tech world is that he exposed the bloated dotcom industry for what it mostly is. The few really good companies have a small number of asskickers and it shows in their products & services. The rest are the ridiculous companies I consult for as I gratefully reach the end of my career.
Re: (Score:3)
It's mostly that Twitter was very conservative in how they ran the business. They were very risk adverse, and didn't push too hard on the monetization. If they thought something would bring in money but piss off their users, they didn't do it. They did have some profitable years, and their revenue was several billion dollars a year. They were just more concerned about long term stability than short term profits.
Musk mostly bought Twitter because he really didn't like what it was. Destroying the old Twitter
Re: (Score:2)
I love it when people talk about Twitter like it was some kind of ancient Greek lyceum. Has everyone forgotten the key role it played in Donald Trump's election in 2016?
To keep this on topic, Twitter did the opposite of Valve and hired like crazy while lavishing stupendous amounts of equity on all those new hires. This was the reason for the headline losses, and they started showing a headline profit when Jack Dorsey ret
Re: (Score:2)
They never really innovated, that was the real problem.
That's a large part of what I meant by being conservative. They had their core product and they were very hesitant to stray from that initial vision. Facebook expanded into a ton of different areas, some successful, some not. That allowed them to grow huge. Twitter didn't do any of that, and was very slow to add features to their site. Twitter preferred sticking to their core vision at the expense of growth.
Re: (Score:2)
Buying Twitter was one of the biggest head scratchers I've seen in a long line of really weird interweb company decisions over the last 30 years.
To be fair Musk didn't want to buy Twitter. He was sued into buying twitter. Turns out running your mouth blindly sometimes has consequences. I just wish that transphobic fuckwit would get some more karma medicine. E.g. if I were a SpaceX shareholder I would have dumped all stock given his recent announcement to move the headquarters based purely on politics that have zero to do with running a business.
Re:What most of us in tech already know ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't recall seeing another gigantic data leak like they were prone to for years before the buyout.
Twitter was a technical shitshow from day 1. Remember the "scaling Ruby On Rails" talk from their early days? That aged like whole milk, didn't it?
Re: (Score:2)
Comparing a mature company to "the early days" doesn't make any sense. There were very real technical scale up issues to be dealt with early on, which were. Over time twitter generally became quite a stable platform.
Then musk bought it. I didn't know someone would need evidence about the downtime. We have covered that on multiple slashdot stories. Musk even tweeted about the high number. A lot of it was to do with him pushing a large number of knee jerk changes through, and thinking he knows better than so
No it's not that they're more productive (Score:2)
That isn't just a software industry. There are studies that show as much as 70% of the middle-class jobs that are parents and grandparents had have gone
Re: (Score:2)
The internet's main function is to suck the value out of everything it touches. What we should hope to reap from this is what I jokingly call the "gay commie Star Trek future", bu
Re: (Score:2)
Don't worry, we just make up supervisory positions. Some company might only have actual 40 hours a week jobs for a dozen people, but they can stack a couple hundred mangers, middle managers, upper middle managers, executives, human resource managers, assistant managers, etc. on top. Plus someone has to make the company newsletter and plan the picnic and Christmas party. Someone and their staff, that is.
Valve is just weird because their founders were crazy and decided people could supervise themselves. Fortu
Re:What most of us in tech already know ... (Score:5, Interesting)
the top few percent of performers are incredibly more productive than the rest if they are allowed to actually make and execute technical decisions
I have found that top performers are . . . perfomatively more productive. They don't necessarily move the business more but their every contribution is seen and acknowledged, often by execs. They are incredibly visible. And everyone else mops up after them.
Groupies want to hang out with rock stars. I don't trust the judgement of any of them.
Re: (Score:2)
But you can tell it's bullshit when the product/business is crap despite their rawk-starriness. It's easier to see it from outside the company, I think. I haven't worked for a company as an "employee" since Dubya was in office, so I haven't had to put up with that nonsense except as an outside consultant/vendor brought in to solve their problem(s). This gives me a degree of perspective and provides armor against the self-promoters.
There are genuine rock sta
Re: What most of us in tech already know ... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: What most of us in tech already know ... (Score:2)
I was a project lead back then. Had one of those guys in my team. Also had a really smart guy. Quiet one. Down to earth. A bit stubborn, but that was it. A joy to work with. Long story short. Mr "I am brilliant" could not cope that I (dumb guy of course) was project lead and he had to listen to my incompetence. Made sure management knew every mistake
Re: (Score:2)
Re: What most of us in tech already know ... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Twitter/X is another recent example: it runs just as badly as it ever did with 80-90% fewer people working there.
Twitter works much more poorly than it used to. The algorithms are dumber (shows me more stuff I block, less stuff I will interact with) and the site has many more technical problems like refusing to accept a tweet until the third or fourth click. It keeps saying there was a problem. No, there still is a problem, and he has a name.
Re: (Score:2)
However, it feels surprising because what you expect out of a very large online marketplace with thousands of products, is a lot of human curating and management. Thousands of flamewars breaking out daily, thousands of reviews to be moderated, hundreds of flash-in-the-pan new games each week to deal with, etc. If you automate this all, you end up like many other online services (Amazon, Facebook, Google, ...) where you have a reputation for shitty service.
work smart ... (Score:2)
... not hard.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: work smart ... (Score:2)
Either instead of neither would be a step up from the usual in this industry.
Re: (Score:2)
If you are an incompetent boob, (e.g., Twitters past and current management) there is no such thing as "working smarter".
Software will eat the world (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
... not hard.
Easier said than done when you’re not a politician perpetually promising a barely-competent society that you’ll “create jobs” out of pure uncut VC and bullshit.
VR on Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
Wish they'd throw 1 or 2 people on payroll to work on SteamVR on Linux
It's 95% of the way there.
Re: (Score:1)
I wish they would pay anyone there to learn Linux at all. They seem to be keen on building an entire empire on top of it while trying to attain as little first-hand, in-house experience with it as possible.
Re: (Score:2)
That's a bold claim to make about a company who run their own Linux distribution. https://store.steampowered.com... [steampowered.com]
Re: (Score:1)
Obviously none of them are using it themselves. There isn't even a graphical control for changing the cpu frequency governor.
Re: (Score:3)
Valve is paying experts at Collabora to work on open source code that benefits the SteamDeck as well as the whole Linux ecosystem:
* https://www.collabora.com/news... [collabora.com]
* https://www.collabora.com/news... [collabora.com]
Re: (Score:1)
That doesn't refute my point. Their hardware survey still detects no touchscreens on my Steam Deck, and no harddrives on my desktop.
Re: (Score:2)
Having a product that technically works, and shipping and maintaining that product to paying customers, are two entirely different things. I suspect they've looked at the market numbers and concluded that there just isn't enough there to make it worth their while, versus other investments they could be making.
I mean (Score:2)
It's easy when you're not really making games anymore.
Re:I mean (Score:5, Funny)
They are regularly pushing updates for DOTA2, TF2, and CS2 was just recently released.
They just can't release any game with a 3 in it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Forget it. Even if they make a game called Half Life 3, it won't be what you wanted, as all the writers have quit since then anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
Valve is seeimingly workling on it's own hero-shooter which could be a welcome entrant to the genre: Valve Deadlock - all heroes and abilities showcase [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
See also: Instagram (Score:4, Interesting)
Instagram only had 13 employees when it was bought by Facebook.
See also: Craigslist (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Craigslist famously destroyed the traditional classified advertising market with just 50 employees.
Traditional classified advertising shunned away sex workers, which Craigslist was rather infamous for. Kinda hard to compete against the drug dealer when all you have to peddle is vitamins.
Re: (Score:2)
FOSTA-SESTA put an end to the personals entirely in 2018.
Baa, We don't need customer service (Score:2, Redundant)
about right (Score:3)
79 people to run Steam sounds about right, if not even a bit much: it is a mature platform that needs only maintenance, bugfixes and minor feature updates.
Re: (Score:2)
79 people to run Steam sounds about right, if not even a bit much: it is a mature platform that needs only maintenance, bugfixes and minor feature updates.
This, steam simply works and works well. They don't need to shoe-horn every possible fad "feature" into it. I'm so glad I've not heard "AI" come anywhere from Valve except in the form of "we won't have AI created games on our platform".
Re:about right (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know; that might have worked for some years when OS vendors cared more about compatibility and continuity than they do now. I guess its still true in big-iron land.
In practice today that does not work nearly so well. To much changes in the environment most software has to run in. A lot of desktop apps (doesn't matter linux/windows/gtk/qt/... etc) that are more than handful of years old don't play well in the current environment as far as integration. You know things like rich-clipboard or drag and
Re: (Score:2)
"Doing nothing" can work for Valve as they're acting as a storefront for other people's products. As long as other people continue to publish on their platform, they can "do nothing" and continue to earn commissions. But if you're actually trying to sell software, if you try to "do nothing", you'll hit market saturation and revenue will dry up.
no surprise (Score:1)
they dont actually do anything though... they dont make games, hell, they dont even check the games they put on steam anymore, they just count the money
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly - why be in the market when you can be the market.
Its a great gig if you have the first mover advantage. The challenge though is disruption does happen (especially in tech) you do have to have the vision to spot the trends, and the execution capability to adapt to them.
AOL - was one the prime online real-estate but they did not have the vision to become geocities, godaddy, and a little later twitter, facebook, etc al
Being the middleman does not require much effort (Score:3)
isn't this comparing apples to busses? (Score:1)
The two comparisons are not equal- EA is all about game development, marketing, voice over work, legal, etc for a bunch of games, their store, etc... steam is essentially an e-commerce site and distribution nodes...
They don't need to develop the backend for every game themselves... they just facilitate sales of games, and provide a user platform to access/play those games.
EA has to build the games and all that involves- plus host them, build out the backend platforms for them to run on, etc... not saying EA