Gabe is the smartest guy in business. Guy is rolling in cash, only for himself and those he choose to share it with.
Idk what they teach you in business school, but it’s probably wrong.
i took one year of business school, and they teach you to offshore outsource as much as possible and to prioritize your shareholders at all costs. so, nothing surprising.
Damn, working for Valve pays very well.
What a great company!
Because they don’t pay any of their actual workforce: the game devs they steal 30% from for every game sold.
This thread contains a lot of great bangers. But let’s play devil’s advocate for just a minute.
Let me know when you build a global distribution platform with 5-9 uptime, credit card processing, full compliance with all of the various laws in all the countries you serve and also provide a cdn for my game for free.
I’ll be waiting. You better pull through on this, you owe the community your labor
Taking a different and hopefully more productive stance than the other guy, I just want to explore people’s thoughts.
People already have built these alternatives. Itch.io, EGS, Humble Store, Microsoft Store, GOG. These platforms exist, but they struggle to achieve the full market dominance that Steam has as the “default” platform, meaning Devs are borderline forced to accept the 30% cut if they have any hope of making sales.
As shown by Steam’s huge profits, they certainly take a higher cut than they have to, and they can definitely stomach a smaller cut
Me: “Rent seeking is an illegitimate practice, landlords steal money from laborers by extorting them for a necessary good!”
You: “Oh yeah? Why don’t you just buy your own land and build your own apartment building?”
You’re a dumbass.
You mean the game devs they provide CDN at no additional costs, networking features a dev environment that is far more comfortable than any competitor and various additional revenue streams (such as trading cards and items)?
It’s still stealing if the profit is this extremely high. Of course a successful business includes providing a useful product. But if you make so much more money per employee than any other company, that means the amount you’re charging is disproportional. They could change Steam fees to 5% and still be extremely profitable. They choose not to because of greed.
This is not me condemning them by the way, I think their greed and what they do with the money available to them is still mostly better than what other people do, but it’s still greed.
I define all excessive profit as stealing. In an ideal world everyone would be earning roughly the same. (Or no earning being necessary at all, but I don’t want to go into every detail)
If you don’t want a publisher to take a cut: self-publish. Every publisher takes a cut. Valve just takes 10% more than everyone else, while also providing more tools and support than anyone else to those devs.
Valve just takes 10% more than everyone else
What do you mean? 30% is used by almost every digital store.
Valve is not a publisher they are a store. The percentage they take is in line with every other digital store, except itch.io Also compared to releasing in brick and mortar stores that percentage is low.
I prefer not to buy games on steam, and when a game is available from another channel (for example Factorio is available on the devs’ website) I will buy it there. And yet, most games are only on steam, so the devs really don’t seem to care about trying to avoid that 30% cut when they can.
You mean the game devs that they take 30% from in a contract the devs agree to in order to list their game on the largest PC gaming store?
Besides that, steam has an incredibly low financial requirement to start selling your games on their platform. $100 usd per game (at least in the US) and you get it back if your game sells enough copies (100 maybe? I forget tbh.) It’s a great platform for indie devs which is why we’ve seen indie PC gaming boom so much in the past decade or so especially.
336 people
30% grabbed from every game
8.56 billion in revenue
The service they privide to devs and customers is worth it, but valve doesn’t even really take 30% anyway. Watch pirate software’s video on it.
I love Steam and I love Gabe, but the system we have that let Steam extract so much money out of the gaming industry is broken.
And that’s true for software or online services in general, and I’m saying that as someone who benefit from that system as a software engineer.
What do you suggest, when the alternatives like epic or Ubisoft are exponentially worse?
It is broken in the sense that it’s absolutely insane that they can take 30% and nobody can build a competing product that only takes 20%.
It is not broken in the sense that they keep doing what they are doing and developers and customers consistently choose their offer.
It’s not a monopoly because they exploit their position.
It’s a monopoly because nobody else is trying hard enough.
I’d argue that Valve does more than just take 30% as a middle man. Between Steam Input, Proton, the beta built in recording system, the Forums for every game, community system and the marketplace, having your game on Steam is a massive value generator for the consumer and by extension developers.
30% might not be what the industry standard should be, but Valve isn’t just providing a standard digital distribution service.
Then why are publishers and customers so loyal then? There has been attempt after attempt to create a competitor but they all fall short. Steam offers so so so much in comparison to the competition it’s not even funny. The 30% is justified.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
As spotted by SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik, some data in the document was viewable despite the black redaction boxes, including Valve’s headcount and gross pay across various parts of the company over 18 years, and even some data about its gross margins that we weren’t able to uncover fully.
The data breaks Valve employees into four different groups: “Admin,” “Games,” “Steam,” and, starting in 2011, “Hardware.”
If you want to sift through the numbers yourself, I’ve included a full table of the data, sorted by year and category, at the end of this story.
In November 2023, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais told The Verge that he thinks “we’re firmly in the camp of being a full fledged hardware company by now.”
The small number of staff across the board seemingly explains why Valve’s product list is so limited despite its immense business as basically the de facto PC gaming platform.
While we haven’t seen any leaked profit numbers from this new headcount and payroll data, the figures give a more detailed picture of how much Valve is spending on its staff — which, given the massive popularity of Steam, is probably still just a fraction of the money the company is pulling in.
The original article contains 620 words, the summary contains 201 words. Saved 68%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Im struggling to convince myself if I should read the article and see if some actual numbers were ever mentioned.
"Hardware,” to my surprise, has been a relatively small part of the company, with just 41 employees paid a gross of more than $17 million in 2021
That’s the only one I saw that meant anything that useful. They have ~10x that for game development but no indication of number of people there, and 79 people working on Steam.
Valve employee data, 2003 - 2021 Year Category [Presumably: Gross pay] [Presumably: Number of employees] 2003 Admin $454,142 5 2004 Admin $548,833 8 2005 Admin $11,644,172 9 2006 Admin $7,905,166 11 2007 Admin $1,997,107 12 2008 Admin $19,519,296 14 2009 Admin $20,300,752 18 2010 Admin $34,754,590 19 2011 Admin $35,216,732 22 2012 Admin $68,925,186 24 2013 Admin $48,462,690 20 2014 Admin $90,406,510 23 2015 Admin $91,496,697 24 2016 Admin $95,444,499 35 2017 Admin $83,146,640 38 2018 Admin $103,479,550 39 2019 Admin $109,720,296 39 2020 Admin $118,435,121 39 2021 Admin $157,999,567 35 2003 Games $3,933,064 57 2004 Games $4,471,342 61 2005 Games $18,122,549 81 2006 Games $17,260,260 97 2007 Games $12,768,984 100 2008 Games $39,677,549 136 2009 Games $44,076,164 148 2010 Games $66,201,302 173 2011 Games $68,173,834 175 2012 Games $135,484,323 186 2013 Games $107,654,658 188 2014 Games $152,351,554 185 2015 Games $181,769,451 160 2016 Games $174,660,830 175 2017 Games $221,488,403 184 2018 Games $216,249,204 192 2019 Games $236,798,782 201 2020 Games $199,306,798 189 2021 Games $192,355,985 181 2003 Steam $1,038,091 16 2004 Steam $1,113,136 16 2005 Steam $2,840,825 23 2006 Steam $3,424,485 29 2007 Steam $3,128,634 34 2008 Steam $5,053,283 40 2009 Steam $7,339,922 51 2010 Steam $17,732,609 60 2011 Steam $16,369,045 101 2012 Steam $42,966,257 127 2013 Steam $44,515,505 128 2014 Steam $52,338,579 119 2015 Steam $72,391,837 142 2016 Steam $56,390,975 125 2017 Steam $64,945,395 102 2018 Steam $70,814,165 82 2019 Steam $66,481,253 80 2020 Steam $71,752,682 82 2021 Steam $76,446,633 79 2011 Hardware $2,252,828 7 2012 Hardware $3,460,641 14 2013 Hardware $5,369,203 20 2014 Hardware $10,180,424 27 2015 Hardware $12,396,140 27 2016 Hardware $11,001,217 36 2017 Hardware $16,724,365 39 2018 Hardware $19,578,951 47 2019 Hardware $15,831,572 47 2020 Hardware $12,008,996 31 2021 Hardware $17,706,376 41
needed some formatting:
Valve employee data, 2003 - 2021
Year Category [Presumably: Gross pay] [Presumably: Number of employees]
2003 Admin $454,142 5
2004 Admin $548,833 8
2005 Admin $11,644,172 9
2006 Admin $7,905,166 11
2007 Admin $1,997,107 12
2008 Admin $19,519,296 14
2009 Admin $20,300,752 18
2010 Admin $34,754,590 19
2011 Admin $35,216,732 22
2012 Admin $68,925,186 24
2013 Admin $48,462,690 20
2014 Admin $90,406,510 23
2015 Admin $91,496,697 24
2016 Admin $95,444,499 35
2017 Admin $83,146,640 38
2018 Admin $103,479,550 39
2019 Admin $109,720,296 39
2020 Admin $118,435,121 39
2021 Admin $157,999,567 35
.
2003 Games $3,933,064 57
2004 Games $4,471,342 61
2005 Games $18,122,549 81
2006 Games $17,260,260 97
2007 Games $12,768,984 100
2008 Games $39,677,549 136
2009 Games $44,076,164 148
2010 Games $66,201,302 173
2011 Games $68,173,834 175
2012 Games $135,484,323 186
2013 Games $107,654,658 188
2014 Games $152,351,554 185
2015 Games $181,769,451 160
2016 Games $174,660,830 175
2017 Games $221,488,403 184
2018 Games $216,249,204 192
2019 Games $236,798,782 201
2020 Games $199,306,798 189
2021 Games $192,355,985 181
.
2003 Steam $1,038,091 16
2004 Steam $1,113,136 16
2005 Steam $2,840,825 23
2006 Steam $3,424,485 29
2007 Steam $3,128,634 34
2008 Steam $5,053,283 40
2009 Steam $7,339,922 51
2010 Steam $17,732,609 60
2011 Steam $16,369,045 101
2012 Steam $42,966,257 127
2013 Steam $44,515,505 128
2014 Steam $52,338,579 119
2015 Steam $72,391,837 142
2016 Steam $56,390,975 125
2017 Steam $64,945,395 102
2018 Steam $70,814,165 82
2019 Steam $66,481,253 80
2020 Steam $71,752,682 82
2021 Steam $76,446,633 79
.
2011 Hardware $2,252,828 7
2012 Hardware $3,460,641 14
2013 Hardware $5,369,203 20
2014 Hardware $10,180,424 27
2015 Hardware $12,396,140 27
2016 Hardware $11,001,217 36
2017 Hardware $16,724,365 39
2018 Hardware $19,578,951 47
2019 Hardware $15,831,572 47
2020 Hardware $12,008,996 31
2021 Hardware $17,706,376 41
