Valve makes almost $50 million per employee, raking in more cash per person than Google, Amazon, or Microsoft — gaming giant's 350 employees on track to generate $17 billion this year
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I think the difference here is that Valve isn’t forcing a monopoly in the way our tech overlords like Google and Amazon do through acquisitions and regulatory capture.
Several companies have tried and mostly failed to compete with Steam, I’m primarily thinking of whatever the EA and Ubisoft launchers are. The two closest have been GOG whom I would argue is fairly successful considering what their goals are and Epic, whom I would say is much less so.
This is the key point people are missing.
Valve arent paying for exclusives or anything, they are just delivering a far better product than anyone else. GOG has it’s DRM-free market, but outside of that, there’s nothing close. Even if Epic Games had feature parity, fuck that company.
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They probably should hire more people and reduce profits. But you can’t just hire anybody and that’s a lot of work.
This is revenue not profit. They need to pay their operating costs with these funds. Their operating costs are probably pretty high considering their global network and distribution. Hiring more people would likely have a minimal impact on their operating costs and each new person may not contribute much to their revenue considering their business model.
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I wonder if they’re also getting paid more or does greedy Gabe just take it all to fund his mega yachts.
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If I want my game to sell I have to release on Steam, though.
You can sell your game on Steam, in addition to other platforms as well.
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Remind me again which game developer had to release their game on Steam? Or which publisher had no choice but to market on the platform? And are you the sole user forced to use Steam, or was that someone else…?
Yeah, why do you buy things if you’re against capitalism? Checkmate.
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I’d think it’s marketing teams, HR, managers, the C-suite.
Those who manage people usually make more than those who dos tuff because they take on more responsibilities.
Yeah I know that’s bullshit and that they shift responsibilities all the time, but good managers do shoulder bullshit so workers can work.
The C-suite being included there made sense of that disparity.
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Valve still makes a ton of money from kids gambling. They don’t care about anything else than money and yet gamers keeps kissing their ass.
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That tends to happen when you have a monopoly on an industry where you get 30% of the revenue from other people’s hard work.
Mono=one poly=seller… and last I checked Steam is not the only seller of video games. They aren’t even the only seller of digital video games. They aren’t even the only seller of digital video games for SteamOS.
They are the largest because they do what’s right by their customers and employees. As a ‘for instance’, I bought Portal 2 for the PS3 many years ago. I no longer have my PS3 but I can still play Portal 2 (as well as Portal which was just thrown in for me) on any PC.
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This is revenue not profit. They need to pay their operating costs with these funds. Their operating costs are probably pretty high considering their global network and distribution. Hiring more people would likely have a minimal impact on their operating costs and each new person may not contribute much to their revenue considering their business model.
Didn’t catch that, thanks. What is their actual profit before personal cost?
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Didn’t catch that, thanks. What is their actual profit before personal cost?
They are a private company, so they don’t have to disclose that.
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Correct. The article is discussing revenue.
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Correct. The article is discussing revenue.
The headline is misleading, it was worth mentioning.
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Interesting that first part… Respectfully, no one is entitled to sales on any platform. As a consumer, I’ve tried other launchers and stores. I hate them all. I choose to only use Steam (for the time being). It’s simply choosing the superior option, but it is an option. I can’t say the same for my internet, energy, or cable companies…
Respectfully, no one is entitled to sales on any platform.
I’ve never said that. Of course if I‘m publishing a game I want it to be successful. If I was a book publisher, I‘d have to sell via Amazon, too, simply because a lot of people never buy anywhere else. It is a requirement to sell on Steam for a successful campaign, and OP implied otherwise.
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It would really help if the would-be competitors focused on consumer-facing features rather than… whatever it is they’re doing. GoG is doing a great job of this, but EGS is still missing even the most basic features years later, because they keep trying to get market share through buying exclusives and giving away free games and that’s sadly never going to work out. They just don’t understand what the consumers in the industry they’re trying to operate in want.
Yeah sure, but acting like I don’t need Steam for my game to sell is untrue.
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Would make him the first billionaire in history to pay his workers their worth, so… Not a fucking chance.
Unfortunately that isn’t true, by accident this has been tested by tech companies like Netflix they were paid in stocks when the company was worth nothing but as it grew they got paid more and more until it became apparent that they didn’t actually have to work anymore entire companies became filled with zombie employees people who don’t work like at all beyond what they are contractually obligated to do, it created huge discontent between the teirs of worker the one’s actually doing the work and the ones getting paid, you almost can’t pay people beyond a certain amount because they don’t work for you then they don’t need to they can live a perfectly fine life without working and nothing gets done so you just have to higher a new staff who once again you can’t in pay too much or they won’t need to work and you’ll just have more zombie employees.
It is actually very well established:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11211-008-0063-2
When Do Financial Incentives Reduce Intrinsic Motivation? Comparing Behaviors Studied in Psychological and Economic Literatures
Objective: To review existing evidence on the potential of incentives to undermine or “crowd out” intrinsic motivation, in order to establish whether and when it predicts financial incentives to crowd out motivation for health-related behaviors. ...
PubMed Central (PMC) (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
https://www.bsfrey.ch/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/crowding-effects-on-intrinsic-motivation.pdf
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Valve still makes a ton of money from kids gambling. They don’t care about anything else than money and yet gamers keeps kissing their ass.
Call me a shill, but Valve’s actions indicate that they care about the money that comes from improving a product or service. That differentiates them from many publicly traded companies that care about money at the expense of the quality of their own products and services.
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Unfortunately that isn’t true, by accident this has been tested by tech companies like Netflix they were paid in stocks when the company was worth nothing but as it grew they got paid more and more until it became apparent that they didn’t actually have to work anymore entire companies became filled with zombie employees people who don’t work like at all beyond what they are contractually obligated to do, it created huge discontent between the teirs of worker the one’s actually doing the work and the ones getting paid, you almost can’t pay people beyond a certain amount because they don’t work for you then they don’t need to they can live a perfectly fine life without working and nothing gets done so you just have to higher a new staff who once again you can’t in pay too much or they won’t need to work and you’ll just have more zombie employees.
It is actually very well established:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11211-008-0063-2
When Do Financial Incentives Reduce Intrinsic Motivation? Comparing Behaviors Studied in Psychological and Economic Literatures
Objective: To review existing evidence on the potential of incentives to undermine or “crowd out” intrinsic motivation, in order to establish whether and when it predicts financial incentives to crowd out motivation for health-related behaviors. ...
PubMed Central (PMC) (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
https://www.bsfrey.ch/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/crowding-effects-on-intrinsic-motivation.pdf
That sounds a lot like the violence inherent in the system
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Mono=one poly=seller… and last I checked Steam is not the only seller of video games. They aren’t even the only seller of digital video games. They aren’t even the only seller of digital video games for SteamOS.
They are the largest because they do what’s right by their customers and employees. As a ‘for instance’, I bought Portal 2 for the PS3 many years ago. I no longer have my PS3 but I can still play Portal 2 (as well as Portal which was just thrown in for me) on any PC.
Ah OK, so the classic monopolies in American History (Standard Oil - controlled 90% of its market; American Tobacco - controlled 80% of its market) were not monopolies.
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I’d think it’s marketing teams, HR, managers, the C-suite.
Those who manage people usually make more than those who dos tuff because they take on more responsibilities.
Yeah I know that’s bullshit and that they shift responsibilities all the time, but good managers do shoulder bullshit so workers can work.
I mean yeah and no. I manage a team, I make 10%-12% more than the team even though technically we do the same tasks. The difference is I need to know their job, but also manage a schedule, and allocate resources, while planning sales for the future stream so they don’t run out of work. It’s a different skillset on top of the team skill requirement.
Not justifying a C suite at 20 million over dudes making 60k though
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You’re not contradicting anything they said, and you’re not contradicting that Steam is a monopoly.
