Gaming @beehaw.org coyotino [he/him] @beehaw.org 3mo ago

Here’s how much Valve pays its staff — and how few people it employs

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

Small company, huge influence.

16 comments

Never really understood why companies like Twitter can have thousands of employees for what the product is.
- Redundant, like the server staff who told Elon it would take 6 months to move the servers... so he decided to move them himself on a whim... and it took 6 months to finish making them operational again?
  
  Or redundant like the content moderation staff, whose redundancy has turned X into an even bigger dumpster fire?
  
  Moderating and serving the content from 300 million users, worldwide, in near real time and no downtime, might seem like a simple task, but it really is not.
- To be fair, Twitter needs very good infrastructure to be usable (e.g. caching) and obviously content moderation is as robust as their investment in it (those could be contract workers though)
  
  So does Valve?
- They don't tbh. I think many jobs there are redundant but people play an elaborate game to pretend it isn't.
- Me neither, and I guess they didn’t need them all in the end!
Easy to employ so few when you ~~dont~~ rarely make games anymore
- They had the same or fewer employees when they were making games, though.
  
  Wow!
Artifact, Heroes of the Storm etc. those are not success stories of recent Valve.
- HotS is a Blizzard game, Valve has DOTA2
  
  facepalm I truly mixed that in my brain. But Valve also has this Dota Chess Game, right? Not sure if you would count that as a success though, have totally lost track of it.
as of 2021, Valve employed just 79 people for Steam, which is one of the most influential gaming storefronts on the planet.

There's value in stability, but some things have long been stagnant and could be improved. It took a long time for the client and website to get some significant changes.

I don't know if I would prefer more changes. I certainly would like and want some. But that could inevitably lead to undesirable changes too.

When I applied for a job there over a decade ago [to improve some stuff myself] I didn't receive an answer.

16 comments