this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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What many posters in this thread fail to realize is that there is a very good reason why steam hasn’t been hit by the enshittification that otherwise permeates human existence in 2024.
Of course, Gaben as their CEO has the last say in it. And he’s just a good guy. But wait, aren’t there other companies that have good guys as their CEO and yet the enshittification persists?
The profound reason is that Valve is not a publicly traded company. They have no obligation to any investors to make number go up. They are a private company, they can do whatever the fuck they want. If they stay flat and keep paying their employees, that’s totally fine, and there is 0 pressure on them to change anything. THAT‘s why Valve seems like such a different company compared to everything else that’s out there.
Of course it’s still a choice to go public or not, and they have made the right call (for us consumers).
Based take imo. I think many posters fail realize the insane amount of money steam makes Valve. Rough estimates are that Steam sold 400 million games last year. Average cost for a game is ~$15.5. Steam has a platform fee of 30%. That means that, roughly, Steam made Valve ~1.86 billion dollars just through the sell of games. Not considering microtransactions or hardware sells. Reportedly, Valve made 1 billion dollars just off cases from CS2 crate openings. Let's just give Valve the benefit of the doubt and assume they made $5 billion dollars last year.
Impressive, but honestly not that impressive when you consider that Xbox brought in 18 billion and PlayStation brought in 30 billion last year. However, if you factor in that Xbox has a head count of ~$20,100 and Sony has one of ~12,700. While Valve has a head count of about ~400. We see that Xbox and Sony are bringing in about $900K and $2.4M per head respectively. Valve is bring in 12.5M per head. Plus Xbox and PlayStation have multiple studios and campuses. While I believe Valve only has the 1 or 2 campuses and they are their only studio.
My point being that, Valve has a ton of liquid cash for investment and growth opportunities. I'd wager Valve brought in more than 5 Billion last year, but with them being a private company, it's hard to pin down what exactly they could've made.