Games

80 world-class engineers sounds like more than enough people. It’s not like Valve struggle to acquire talent and are thus forced to have teams and teams of juniors who are masters at building tech debt.

Valve will likely be hiring and retaining the kinds of engineers who love a good refactor and appreciate the time and space to do that rather than some product manager pressuring for the next shiny shit they wanted yesterday.

And Steam is their money printing machine that keeps them free to do whatever they want. It’s no surprise their team have stayed invested in continuing to build out the best gaming platform of all time.

80 talented, passionate, and healthily paid engineers > 800 junior, sleep deprived, and struggling to buy groceries “coders”.

Because they tried competing and it didn't work because they kept offering an inferior product, so they're trying to weasel Steam out of the market

Shit on? This is some baller ass shit -- What is the rev per employee a billion dollars?!?!?!

How is this even shitting on them? It's impressive af

I definitely didn't interpret this as shitting on Steam. In fact, the opposite.

Because other articles cite about 350 (heh, inb4 three-fiddy) for the whole of Valve. This is just Steam.

Seems like a good example of how running a company for the shareholders doesn’t produce a a better product after all.

The case seems like such a reach. At worst it's an effective monopoly for devs, not consumers. Devs have a really hard time selling elsewhere.

That said, I love Steam and think it's genuinely one of the best companies out there. And whilst it's not great that they're so big, they aren't that big due to anti-competitive behaviour. It's quite the opposite. You can add non-Steam games to your library and use Steam features. The fucking Steam deck isn't locked down, and you can install non-Steam games. Just because Uplay wants to log me out every time I reboot doesn't mean Steam should be sued.

There are so many other companies more deserving of the lawsuit

A lot of companies have been trying to sue them and are trying to tarnish their name in any way possible because their case is already shaky at best. The whole "monopoly" thing despite competition existing and Valve only being on top because they're the best feature wise stuff.

The Microsoft Store and how to redeem games is so mind-numbly stupid. GamePass wowed me with their library and the subscription service. But how they do everything, from DRMing their games in a absolute mindfuckery app folder, to locking it into your Microsoft account and ecosystem, was so frustrating. Modding? Eat a Microdick. Hell, save files don't even transfer between Steam and Microsoft GamePass games because FUCK YOU PLAYERS.

I'm glad Steam was extremely proactive at moving off of Windows.

Because we have been led to believe that the "titans" of industry are these super above average smart people. In reality it's a bunch of nepo babies with no unique skills (other than, perhaps, a good education) which only copy each other.

After covid, all big IT companies started hiring like mad men... Then they all started firing people like crazy. They are driven more by speculation on their stock price and FOMO than any actual business strategy

Because Epic Games is really hoping to turn people against steam any way they can other than actually improving their service or morals.

This is a "they are hoarding all the profits" "they're not open to stock exchange" "why I can't have a piece if this cake, it's unfair" kind of news.

Pure pressure politics.

I honestly think it's a badge of honor.

I worked in a company where we had 1000+ engineers on a SAAS platform for three years. And it barely has the same relevance or reach as Steam.

The report says that Valve has ~350 employees total, and of those employees only 80 actually work on Steam as a storefront. The rest are working on their games and hardware.

That's total employees at Valve. This is a subset of those that work on Steam.