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Here’s how much Valve pays its staff — and how few people it employs (www.theverge.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

How is Valve supposed to pay for the infrastructure and maintenance without charging devs for using their enormous platform? I'm genuinely curious what ideas you have. Disregard everyone's non-sequiturs here, please.

[+] firadin -11 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

By charging 3% instead of 30%? Do you really think their servers cost $8.5b? Does the work to distribute a game and process payment equal 30% of the labor required to make a game?

A more advanced answer would be a cost plus profit model, so if it costs Valve $1 to transfer 1TB of data transfer (in terms of server costs), then charge $1.10 for 1TB. That's obviously very difficult to calculate though I bet Valve has some internal metric of costs.

Valve today does the exact thing Unity was trying to do, charging a percent of revenue for providing infrastructure. Unity got raked over the coals for it.

[–] Xenny 17 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Unity was changing the rules after they were already set in place. Valve has never done such a move.

Imagine though if steam suddenly went to a flat fee per install instead of charging the 30% of the sale on their platform.

They would rightly be raked over the coals. But they won't make such a dumb fucking move because it's a dumb fucking move.

I'm not one for Corpos but as far as attacking them goes valve is certainly near the bottom of the list.

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