Steam Is Run By Fewer Than 80 Staff, Lawsuit Docs Reveal
It has been revealed through a series of lawsuit-related documents that Steam is maintained by a relatively small team.
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Reliable, low maitenance, with good infastructure. 80 sounds like a solid number when not including game devs and support staff.
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”.
For serious. I wish they hired remote.
This likely management 101 in action
Amazing what happens if you treat people right and let them do their job
Instead we got too much management constantly causing churn
"I have 8 different bosses. That means when I make a mistake, I have 8 different people coming by to tell me about it."
From a comment below, Valve as a whole supposedly has around 350, of which around 80 work on Steam.
Love to refactor, the more I watch the Mesa graphics drivers and the employees valve hired that work on it the more I believe it
Or they hire contractors without any job security
without any job security
That's USA. They don't belive in job security.
What good is job security when we get an automatic pay cut every year? We get raises by switching jobs!
Also explains why Steam is still a 32-bit binary and didn't get ARM port on any platform.
I think the point is that with this kind of upkeep costs it's hard to argue that Steam sales cut is fair, especially given near-monopoly in PC gaming space.
At this point, their cut is just about mathematically fair, given how little value customers get from buying games most other places and how much value they get from Steam. Then that money got funneled back into decoupling PC gaming from Microsoft and making probably the only mass produced handheld gaming system that's open enough to let you opt out of their ecosystem. I'd be really curious as to how many games on Steam even have ARM builds, because I'll bet it's a very low number, and that would likely make the juice not worth the squeeze.
Their cut is mathematically fair but the inputs for this formula are mostly pain tolerance levels of consumers and producers. I meant fair for having a monopoly. Either you're a utility or need to be broken up so that actual competition can take place.
Steam Deck and Proton killed Linux gaming because nobody bothers to do native ports. While I don't agree with that approach it kinda works but it's not that Valve does this because they like Linux. They're scared of losing their monopoly in case Windows changes too much.
There are ARM native games on Mac (Disco Elysium for example) and Steam has no issues with them. Not having ARM client though means that you're running a dynamically recompiling web browser through a translation layer resulting in terrible performance.
Pain tolerance levels? The biggest pain points I have with Steam are that it's not universally DRM-free (which is why I shop GOG first) and that their multiplayer servers go down for 15 minutes during maintenance windows once or twice per week. Native Linux ports were not going to become more common prior to Proton; they were on the fast track to becoming less common, especially given how many more games are now released every year, and Proton has the added benefit of adding Linux support to games where it was just never going to feasibly happen otherwise.
While I don’t agree with that approach it kinda works but it’s not that Valve does this because they like Linux. They’re scared of losing their monopoly in case Windows changes too much.
It's both. That fear of losing their market position is exactly how a functioning market is supposed to work. Competition is supposed to come in and outdo Valve. EA looked like they were interested for a little while back when they launched Origin, but they changed their minds. Epic says they're interested now, but they only want sellers and not customers. It's not a monopoly, legally, when they attained their market position by just being better than everyone else.
There are ARM native games on Mac (Disco Elysium for example) and Steam has no issues with them.
And I wonder how many more there are out there. Because if that number is low enough, it may just not be worth it to bother. I'd imagine it's a nightmare to have to support Apple through all of their standards that they dictate at their business partners. Valve went through the trouble of making a Vulkan->Metal translation layer, since Apple refused to support open standards, and then Apple retired x64 on their machines shortly afterward.
Pain tolerance to prices, how good the support is, how snappy the app is etc. Within the space of game marketplaces they're average and that's because every one of them kind of sucks. If Epic was first to monopolize PC game marketplaces people would be defending them like they defend Valve now because they want all of their games in one place.
Linux gaming was stable before Proton. It was never big but mainstream titles were getting released. These days there's nothing. Titles could be broken at any moment by a developer and nobody will have any responsibility to fix it. I very much doubt that a for profit company does anything because they "like" something like Linux. They're there to make money, period.
I'm not saying Valve should port their games to ARM or update them, it's up to them and they don't seem to be interested in developing games all that much these days. My point wad that plenty of games run via Rosetta2 fine. Steam doesn't run fine because essentially it's a web browser and that's where you can say that 80 developers might not be enough to support this money printing machine.
If Epic was first to monopolize PC game marketplaces people would be defending them like they defend Valve now because they want all of their games in one place.
No, people accept Steam because of the proven track record, values of their leadership, their hardware and the work they do with Linux.
Linux gaming was stable before Proton.
Please.
EGS would have all this in that hypothetical scenario, why wouldn't it?
Pain tolerance to prices? We're talking about the platform whose name is frequently coupled with the word "sale". Given the complete lack of ideas out of Epic in the year 2024, I don't have much confidence that they'd have risen to be a dominant market leader in the first place.
Linux gaming was stable before Proton. It was never big but mainstream titles were getting released.
Stable, but not many titles. Mainstream titles were getting released because Valve was either greasing the wheels or because those partners thought Steam Machines were going to be a bigger deal. When they weren't a bigger deal, those mainstream titles dried up fast. The Witcher 3 and Street Fighter V both announced Linux ports and cancelled them when the writing was on the wall for Steam Machines. Both now work in Proton.
I very much doubt that a for profit company does anything because they “like” something like Linux. They’re there to make money, period.
I was told, to my face, by a Valve employee between the launch of Steam Machines and the release of Proton, that a lot of engineers at Valve "are enamored with Linux" before he gave me a look indicating that he couldn't say more. But also, yes, the pursuit of making money leads to all sorts of wonderful new things, like simultaneously porting more than half of the history of PC gaming to a different operating system.
I’m not saying Valve should port their games to ARM or update them, it’s up to them and they don’t seem to be interested in developing games all that much these days. My point wad that plenty of games run via Rosetta2 fine. Steam doesn’t run fine because essentially it’s a web browser and that’s where you can say that 80 developers might not be enough to support this money printing machine.
But if there aren't many games ported to ARM, and if the number of games running via Rosetta "fine" isn't high enough, then the number of customers you're benefiting by making a native ARM build of Steam is very low, and throwing more developers at the problem only makes that math worse. I think you should have a better Steam on Mac. I also know that Apple is actively hostile to gaming on Mac, so I get it if Valve isn't super interested.
The only reason you don't see the price as a pain point is that you refuse to see that about 50% of that goes to companies that make billions in profit while people like you and me can't afford rent.
Valve is not your landlord. They made a good place to buy video games. And come on, now; it's 30% at most to Valve (which is less than brick and mortar before it) and then some more to the government.
30% for Valve, another 10 to 20% for the publisher...
Guess where the billionaires work?
There isn't always a publisher. Sometimes the publisher owns them outright, and the devs will only see a salary in either case. There are only a handful of publishers that are worth more than a billion dollars and therefore run by billionaires, and they account for very few game releases in a given year on Steam these days. There's a lot of nuance to this. And quite frankly, if a game I want to play comes from a billionaire's company, I'm going to buy the game, they're going to get some of my money, and I won't feel bad about that.
Billionaires, multimillionaires, they're all part of the problem. Right now you're defending the people making you pay more for stuff than it's worth.
If this was true, games would cost 18% less on EGS because they only take 12%. Shockingly enough, they cost the same.
Because the same games sell for more elsewhere (also, funnily enough, we're seeing tons of info on Valve because they're getting sued for including a non compete clause in their contract to prevent games from being sold for less elsewhere), that's an issue for the market as a whole and doesn't apply to video games only. You're paying too much for your food, for your gas, for your housing, for your clothes, for every fucking thing!
Profit shares for distributors will need to be regulated and wealth tax will need to be applied.
This is completely incorrect. Their contract states that you can't sell Steam keys for less elsewhere, which is entirely fair in my opinion. If your game is on multiple platforms or storefronts, you can sell it for whatever price you want there. The fact is that nobody does; they list it for the same everywhere and pocket the difference if someone buys on EGS.
Show us price comparisons between storefronts. Prove what you're saying. Full retail price, not sales prices.
That's my fucking point, the whole distribution chain needs to be regulated to stop distributors pocketing so much of our money when they're accomplishing barely any of the actual work. It's not a Valve problem, it's a capitalism problem!
So you think grocery chains are making record profit every year without it impacting your wallet or something?
I disagree with your definition of "killed Linux gaming." It killed native Linux development perhaps. But using Linux for gaming is more viable than ever thanks to Valve. They single handedly boosted Linux gaming, if anything.
And they also offer more than the competition. For a while there games on EGS were just telling people to get support on steam forums because epic had nothing for supporting games they sold. Steam has forums, screenshot storage, achievements, remote play, friends lists, a shopping cart (🙄) and is adding new features like clips. I'm not using steam because it's a monopoly, I'm using it because it's a better platform.
Killed Linux gaming? I hard disagree with that. Yes developers may not do Native ports as often anymore but I would much rather have the ability to play games that are not considered a native Port because the ocean is so much vaster. If anything proton in the steam deck put Linux on the map, prior to the deck AAA titles you would never see running on Linux you barely saw AA titles on it. However with the introduction of the steam deck in proton we now have companies moving closer to at least making sure their game is compatible with the deck which is one step closer to allowing it to be Linux compatible. It allows you to take your windows games and for the most part just be able to play it without having to have the studio spend as much for it as they would with a native port, because that's the number one thing that holds them back from making a native Port the lack of market share. I would not have switched off of Windows if this was not the case because that was basically the only thing that was holding me on Windows still was the lack of decent gaming support
Let's take Elden Ring for example, it plays beautifully I haven't had a single problem playing it. They weren't going to release a Linux branch but they made sure it was steamdeck compatible, which meant that it was proton compatible which then allows me to play this amazing game on my Debian 12, a game that otherwise would not have worked because none of the other translation layers function with it. I notice zero difference in performance it plays flawlessly, but I would not have been able to play this game otherwise. It might as well be a native Port because I've had zero issues with functionality.
The Factorio development blog has a piece on developing Linux-native. Basically there's ONE GUY who works on the LInux-native version, and it's a lot more challenging than people think -- from managing and linking dependencies, to working around GNOME's monumentally stupid decision to expect client-side decorations from all apps. It's simply more worthwhile to ensure that a game works well on WIne/Proton.
it's hard to argue that Steam sales cut is fair
It's actually pretty easy to argue it's fair once you look at everything. Steam offers a shit ton of resources for that 30%, including hosting, distribution, patching, workshop, etc. And that's not even getting into the fact that the dev can get all of that AND get steam keys that they can distribute themselves (meaning valve doesn't get a cut of that) that still utilizes the same infra.
I wish I could find it, but I recently saw a video of Thor (@piratesoftware, does his own game dev and used to work for Blizzard) talking about this and going into even more detail than I can remember at the moment.
The cut would be less if competition was possible. I will bet my arm, first child and souls on this.
And you'd lose all of that.
Competition isn't possible? EGS is an active competitor that only takes 12% and they still can't get fucking anywhere because their store fucking sucks. GoG exists and also takes 30%, their store/launcher are ok, but they don't offer nearly as much for that 30%, but they make up for that with drm free games. There are other minor players out there, so competition is definitely possible, but not one of them offers a comparable product.
The only way steam would lower their cut is if someone came along and made a game store that actually offered a significant portion of the services steam offered and was about as good but also had a lower cut of sales. But good luck finding someone who can do all of that and also takes less than 30%.
You don't seem to understand what a monopoly is. Having some small competition that's not ever going to threaten you because you can leverage your dominant position is also a case of a monopoly.
Epic poured billions of Fortnite money with little to show for it. How is anyone going to compete with a platform that most gamers have all of their games on? This is why they need to be broken up or brought to order via regulations. Companies are not your friends.
Success is not illegal. Valve isn't buying up smaller competing storefronts, or paying off developers for exclusivity, or burying competition in legal fees and prepared 80-page lawsuits. The only thing holding back real competition is the competing platforms being dogshit.
I was excited for the EGS when it was announced. Then it turned out to be a garbage platform with the shady exclusivity deals that turned Steam into an ad platform for games that had been poached by Epic. Valve responded to it with the Steam Deck and Proton.
Leveraging dominant position to keep your monopoly is illegal even in the US.
Allegations of leveraging a dominant market position doesn't mean its actually happening.
Valve had nothing to do with its competitors being garbage
What are they doing to leverage their dominant position?
At some point you're so entrenched in the market you don't have to do anything anymore. I was quite surprised that Valve somehow evaded EU Digital Markets Act gatekeeper criteria.
How is anyone going to compete with a platform that most gamers have all of their games on?
They could offer their games DRM-free, guarantee that their multiplayer games have LAN or provide servers and/or at least provide that information clearly to the consumer, write an open source drop-in replacement for Steam Input and Workshop, guarantee more uptime on their matchmaking/friends servers, retain old versions of games that they distribute, and allow for user-customized or open source clients to fit all sorts of UI preferences, off the top of my head.
Those things are up to developers / publishers, not the marketplace.
GOG mandates that all games must be DRM-free, so when I shop there, I know what I'm getting. Valve has tags that tell me if a game supports LAN, but developers aren't required to report that, so I can't tell if a multiplayer game I'm buying is built to last if the developer didn't think to list it; if they were required to, that would be different. People lean on Steam Input and Workshop because those features are made easy for them, but using them means you don't get those benefits outside of Steam, so there should be an open, third party alternative that developers can easily switch to if they're familiar with developing for Steam; a company running a non-Steam store has an incentive to develop this. Matchmaking and friends servers, as they exist today, are frequently provided by the storefront, so when Steam servers go down for maintenance and I'm in the middle of an online match of Skullgirls, we get disconnected, and we have to wait until they come back up; there are ways to increase uptime and prevent this interruption, but Valve hasn't improved the situation in at least 15 years.
Honestly, even those are pretty overkill to make a competing storefront. All you'd have to do is to offer lower prices and/or take a smaller percentage while matching at least a fraction of Steam's functionality (unlike Epic) or actively working to screw over customers (also unlike Epic). If a store sold games consistantly 5% cheaper than Steam, even without controller options, good support, a built-in forum, explicit Linux support, ect., I'm confident it would be reasonably successful. Just look at Humble and Fanatical. While they do (mostly) sell Steam keys, their prices are arguably what made them a success, not the features you get after redeaming the Steam keys.
Even beside that, the ideas you provided are all pretty minor. If you're willing to throw more significant amounts of money at the platform, like many before have, you can go a lot further than that even. For example, seeing as Steam's discovery algorithm is one of the bigger benifits Steam provides, you could one-up them by providing off-platform marketing for games launching on your platform. This would be a way to bring devlopers and players alike to use your platform without screwing over either. Similarly, you could take a page out of Epic's book and do giveaways regularly. Alternatively, you could use a less generous system such as "buy anything and get x game free" or "every $10 spent gives you a chance to win x game bundle" to make it more sustainable, and/or allow you to market specific underperforming games. It isn't that hard to come up with ideas that would allow a competitor to do well. You just have to do that rather than putting all your resources into trying to take games away from players, and harvest their data.
Epic poured billions of Fortnite money with little to show for it.
Yes, Into fortnite, not EGS. The eggs spent all their money on timed exclusives instead of a better product, and that's why they failed to make a steam competitor.
Those free games weren't actually free, Epic paid for them, you know.
Oh, I know. I got exactly 1 free game from EGS, which I promptly bought on stream myself once I realized that EGS had no offline mode (so the game I had been playing refused to launch during an Internet outage).
And that's one of the many reasons EGS isn't able to get a significant market share, because as I said initially, EGS fucking sucks. If they spent half as much on improving the store as they do for timed exclusives and trying to lure people in with free games, they might actually get somewhere.
You dont seem to understand what a monopoly is either since steam isnt one
They make billions in profit, fuck off with it being fair.
Making money isn't evil.
Making billions always happens at the expense of people like you and me.
Show us on the doll where the Valve hurt you
It's not a Valve issue, it's a capitalism issue and you're a victim of it just like I am.
Oh, I see. You're still in highschool.
Have fun with that.
Waah it's not faaaair!
Fair isn't a thing.
Blame the game not the player, it's not like they are doing some next level weird shit like all the competition does. This rigged economic system allowed this situation.
As an Indie dev, a 30% cut of profit could be the death of my one man studio (if I ever get around to actually starting it)
Ok, so then handle all of that yourself at cost. Which will lead to the death of your studio faster?
Seriously though, a $15 game selling just 100k copies is still $1m to you (before taxes) and has no upkeep. You do all that steam does yourself, you're going to drown in operations costs and upkeep time.
I agree with you but at the same time I feel like I should point out that this is the China fallacy, where there's a billion people in China and if you could just tap into even 0.3% of their market you would make bank.
While it's technically true, the fallacy behind it overshadows the difficulty of acquiring that percentage of the market. The grand majority of games released never become cash positive, and over 50% of games on steam alone never make more than $4,000.
https://vginsights.com/insights/article/infographic-indie-game-revenues-on-steam
This is not an issue with distribution, it's an issue with marketing and market fit, and accompanied by the base fact of that if you're the kind of person who is good at making games, it would be a rarity for you to also be the kind of person that's good at marketing the games you made.
Those are two entirely different wheelhouses that function best with two entirely different personality types, and that's not covering all of the different disciplines that you need to make a game or run a game making company in the first place.
Use Steams competitors then if you don't want to pay Steams cut. If you're getting less overall from them, that tells you all you need to know about the validity of Steams fees
I think you missed my point. I am in favor of steam and valve by far, my quibble is with the idea that anyone can sell 100,000 copies of a $15 game.
For every Stardew Valley there are thousands of other games no one has ever heard of and that almost no one bought.
By all means though, make great games. I'll be buying them on steam.
Ah fair. My reading comprehension also failed there because I thought you were the same person the person you responded to was responding to was (Person I thought you were - Person you responded to - you - me: if that makes what I said make more sense). I guess my response though is that discoverability is going to be an issue for any new game regardless of whether someone chooses to put their game on Steam or not (and I'd argue that not putting their game on Steam would negatively impact their discoverability, hence another point in favour of Steams cut)
edit: (I actively hate Epic though, so consider taking their money as losing the possibility of ever getting mine. I am NOT for console exclusive bs on the PC marketplace, and Epic is actively trying to make that a thing. So if you except money from epic to go exclusive on their store, I'm only ever going to pirate your game, if I can even be bothered to play it at all)
After that well-informed take, listen to an actual indie developer talk about why the 30% is worth it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwoAmifo9r0 (it's a separate but similar lawsuit by a "waaahmbulance-chaser" law firm in the UK)
Damn dude that link fuckin DESTROYS every braindead "b-b-but STEAMS MONOPOLY!!!" arguement I've seen uttered by idiots who want to bring late stage capitalism to the PC marketplace just so they can pretend they stood up to a company
Yes, developers are also victims of this monopoly. It's obviously better ("worth it") to pay 30% for visibility on the biggest marketplace.
They also maintain file hosting for saves, game versions and a lot of useful apis for games https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features
Yes, it's a nice cage.
Enjoy accelerating late stage capitalism while pretending you're against it because you're incapable of seeing things outside of black and white thinking
I'm accelerating late stage capitalism by being critical of monopolies? What???
Found Machkovetch's Rosen's Lemmy account
;)
I've been reading Ars Technica for over 20 years now but that's because I like their points, not because I write for them xd
Haha naw the joke was supposed to be name of the guy who's suing them but i ruined it by getting David Rosens name like ... Completely wrong.
I don't know how that happened besides not having my coffee and death stick yet
Yeah, I gathered as much while trying to figure out who that is :)