I wonder if they’re also getting paid more or does greedy Gabe just take it all to fund his mega yachts.

Would make him the first billionaire in history to pay his workers their worth, so… Not a fucking chance.

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.

Did a little digging, apparently in a 2021 lawsuit, documents were released with bad redactions (they blacked out over the data, but the underlying information was still able to be highlighted and copied/pasted. Very common error when redacting PDFs)

I haven’t checked the data myself but according one user this was the breakdown:

“Total staff as of 2021: 336 people

Administration: 35 people making an average of 4.5 million a year

Game Developers: 181 people making an average of 1 million a year

Steam Developers: 79 people making an average of 960k a year

Hardware Developers: 41 people making average of 430k a year”

Normally I would guess that “average” here probably means a few people making a ton of money while others get shafted. But I think “admin” probably accounts for that. We have no official way of knowing the true breakdown since this info is not supposed to be public

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…?

All of them.

Doesn’t make it less of a monopoly.

What does administration mean there? Like accounting, human resources and so? How could they make, in average, way more that developers??

No no Gabe just works 31.244.670 times as much as his employees.

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.

If I want my game to sell I have to release on Steam, though.

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.

They probably should hire more people and reduce profits. But you can’t just hire anybody and that’s a lot of work.

This actually seems like not a terrible spread. The average for the top earners is a little more than 10x the average for the lowest earners… Obviously outliers could be skewing that data (there could be one hardware developer making 30 million while the others work for poverty wages) but from the data we have, this isn’t nearly as wide a gap as I would have expected.

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.

Wouldn’t surprise that much, as far as I’ve heard from as far as I remember Valve is a great place to work and by all accounts treat their employees well.

Revenue. Revenue is not profit.

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…

Do they have any kind of profit sharing program?

I’d be kind of pissed if I worked there and made like $70k or whatever, only to read this shit.