We learned just how small Valve really is this year, but also how good it is at raking in the cash: It's making more money per employee than Apple
We learned just how small Valve really is this year, but also how good it is at raking in the cash: It's making more money per employee than Apple
I hope the employees are compensated well compared to the profit.
As of 2021, Valve employees made roughly $430K-4.5M, depending on role. Not bad, considering the average salary in WA is around $58k.
Source:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24197477/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-payroll-redacted
Holy shit
Interesting. Looks like the hardware people are the lowest paid department.
Which maybe makes sense. They've started to see some success there, but not the way Steam or TF2 has.
They’re around a big city, so the Seattle metro is about $76k. Still great for the valve employees though.
It's a bit weird (skip to 10:41 for specifically the pay system)
I'll bet they all can afford a half-dozen yachts.
you may think a company named valve would know a thing or two about cash flow
The valve is actually broken, stuck in the on position.
It's funny that these publications only learned that this year when Valve has had a publicly available company directory on their website with names, pictures and email addresses since forever.
They didn't just learn about it there have been articles about it for years and years they just post the same old article from a few years ago and act like it's new
Their super high revenue/profit per employee has been reported on periodically for years. I remember hearing this fact literally ten years ago.
Is Gabe taking a duck face selfie in the thumbnail?
Yeah it’s from a video where he was back seating on some voice actors doing announcement and he’s doing odd things background for comedic effect.
Yup. It‘s from the Cave Johnson Announcer Pack reveal video. Which is definitely worth a watch, even if you‘re not into Dota 2.
Might have something to do with getting underage kids hooked on gambling.
Kinda exposes the lie about entrepreneurship being about job creation. Not all high tides raise all ships.
"It's making more money per employee than Apple"
And how much are the game devs whos game are on steam making? If Valve ceo has enough money to buy a billion dollar worth fleet of mega yachts the share is simply off, Valve is making billions nobody else is.
70%...and devs are happy to pay the 30% to get on a platform that's worth a fuck. Valve carries the servers, the bandwidth and service. Tons of indie devs have made it via steam. They're a platform for games, not a healthcare company or apple that's exploiting slave labor.
Plenty of villans out there, valve and gabe isn't one of them.
That's highly debatable. Maybe not for the specific reason being discussed, but Valve, and by extension Gabe, IS complicit in stuff like CS:GO gambling which preys on the underaged and and vulnerable.
valve and gabe isn’t one of them.
A guy who owns a billion dollar worth fleet of mega yachts in 2024 (climate crisis and everyone getting poorer) sounds quite the villain to me.
Tons of indie devs have made it via steam.
And even more didn't make it. Steam being so big and the market spinning around it actually works against promoting smaller games because there's just as much you can see on steam shelf.
Devs are happy to loose 30% ? Uhrffdruhehu jirddrhuduh
Considering their only major competitor has enough money to keep trying to lure players to their significantly worse store system with free games for years now instead of going the route of actually providing a decent product I think Valve making money off their good product strategy is a good thing.
Exactly. Steam's main competitors:
Except EGS, all of them sell their games on Steam, and Steam completely dominates PC gaming. They don't have any exclusives other than the handful of Valve-developed games, they don't bribe players with free games (and their sales are rarely the best), and the only hardware they make is open to direct competition if competitors bother to make a client for it (and users can play non-Steam games through Steam as well).
The only "bad" thing Steam does is charge a 30% fee, but they also let devs sidestep that through selling free Steam keys on other stores (or directly). Valve isn't the villain here, and they're arguable the least bad in their industry, except maybe GOG, but their DRM-free stance has less weight due to Steam's good policies and superior customer support.
The entry ticket means billions... They lock the game market.
Valve takes 30% on every game sold and you don't even own the games. That's sick capitalism in action, yet everybody kisses their ass.
EDIT for the Steam jerkers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r0a7-qyjss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y
They do provide a good service. There’s no subscription fee. They maintain delisted games so you can download games you bought years ago that are no longer available. Not to mention steam OS and other projects like the steam deck that put pressure on other gaming companies to do better.
This could go up in a cloud of smoke at any point and it likely will as soon as Gabe passes on and the in fighting begins. So this is a “good king” situation and the system itself will not be sustainable long term by any means.
Because somehow their competition is even worse
Ah, yes, capitalism. Because they don’t have to pay to maintain servers and infrastructure or anything, right?
Nor do they pay for bandwidth when you download your 100gb game for the nth time in the past month.
Nor do they have a ton of functions and services for both devs and consumers like easy refunds, regional pricing, steam keys, trading cards, steam workshop, steam forums, chatrooms, remote play... just to name some.
Yeah, such moneygrabbing comic book villains that just sit in their pile of money and don't provide anything good.
Ah, yes, capitalism. Because they don’t have to pay to maintain servers and infrastructure or anything, right?
They are stacking billions. It means they are paying peanuts compared to what they are making.
I read somewhere most of the cost is payment providers, scams, chargebacks and refunds they can't offload onto the publishers.
I like Steam but come on, they are more profitable per employee than Apple. They are clearly not hurting even if I download my games over and over.
How does valve's ass taste?
Honestly, I pay for the service alone.
Pirating games is easy-ish enough so if Valve ever enshittifies I will be quickly learning how to remove Steam's DRM and put all my games on a server and never purchase another video game in my lifetime.
As far as capitalism goes they are not the shittiest of companies out there.
They have predatory tactics with lootboxes on their popular games though.
But most of their practices are not anticonsumer.
And they do not enforce drm and their own drm is a joke, so you can basically own most games if you want with very little effort. Just copy the files and have a generic steam crack around and you are golden for most cases.
They provide an easy platform for me to buy games so I use them. The steam deck too. Just because they have a competent product, i don't think that justifies any arse kissing. Like you say, they're a company and they're in business to make money.
Yeah, I can see why developers would be unhappy about the 30%. Maybe there's an argument to be made that the platform gives these games a greater potential market but I don't know enough about the business to try making that argument.
I believe this is something to be aware of and if this is something you don't want use GOG instead. But in reality as long as Steam exists you will be able to download and play your games. If Steam ceases to exists then you will not be able to download them, but there will be ways to still play them, if you previously downloaded them. It is not like "owning" movies on Amazon (or just recently on the Playstation Store), where you always need to stream the movies.
I know according to their license if steam ceases to exist you lose everything, but I can't see them ceasing to exist and having it not end up being a bloody mess. There is no way with how large steam is that if they decide to file for closure tomorrow that regulators wouldn't get involved in trying to provide a way that everyone doesn't lose their games. I believe steam has hit the point that banks are where enough people use the platform that if it tried to close government is going to get involved
Of course this is under the understanding that it's a just choose to close situation, if it is a financial issue, I would expect that people would see that coming ahead of time and they would have a longer period of trying to find out a solution. And that solution could very well end up being a court order saying every purchase that's been on Steam has to be able to be played without the steam client when they close the doors
Honestly, I'll probally care about this more when someone else tries to make a service remotely close to what steam provides. Hell epic is probally the closest we got and they are in the red AND lacking in function set that steam provides. Steam charges 30% up until 10m and then 25 till 50m then it'd 20% while giving a multitude of extra services the other companies charging similar rates don't, seems fair to me.
some examples:
Looking into it, IGN made a nice picture (2019 though so a little old perhaps) so I'll add that too
Yeah. Really wish they were more like gog or itch
And the share of Valve in the computer video game market is around 75% and even more than 80% in Europe. This company is clearly in a monopoly situation that prevents any competition. This situation is clearly undesirable.
They're not preventing competition. Valve did not go out of its way to kill Epic, Epic just sucks. They're not doing anything to kill GOG either.
There's a difference between a monopoly, and people just choosing one thing over another.
There’s Xbox, but when that’s the alternative it is clear why Steam still dominates
did pcgamer learn it by reading a similar article awhile back?
A great deal of that money comes Valve running an illegal underage casino, and getting young kids addicted to gambling.
Valve running an illegal underage casino
Valve doesn't run the casino. Valve owns the real estate under the casino and collects a rent. The casino is run by a kaleidoscope of fly-by-night marketing firms after being constructed with sweatshop labor from development studios in countries with abysmal labor laws.
Turns out, it takes very few employees to be the landlord of a casino. But the casino can't make money without a battalion of scammy sales shits and a legion of cheap construction workers. Valve can't make money without these workers. But because it collects rents on the real estate rather than revenues on the casino itself, it doesn't need to include these staffers in its accounting books.
Valve is directly responsible for skins in Counter Strike which are gotten with 100% gambling mechanics. The fact that they can be sold for real life cash adds to this. I'm not saying its only Valve doing this, plenty of other games on Steam as well, but they certainly have a horse in the race.
The government need to get involved and relegate MTX. I agree they are responsible for hosting the platform and developing the systems in the case of CS skins. It's ugly but Valve are behaving as a rational business actor in this scenario.
I’m specifically talking about CS:GO, which is the most predatory and developed by Valve to be so.
No, there's companies that abuse valves market for their underground casinos.
I honestly don't get why you are mad at valve when they are not even in the slighest involved in that process apart from offering the market system. That's like being mad at cloudflare or AWS because a website that scams you uses it.
It's because Epic Games is spending a shitload of money astroturfing these idiots into believing that Valve is personally running a massive counter strike casino and you need to THINK OF THE CHIILLLLDREEEEEEEN.
Tbh valve could stop this by making it only tradeble to your friends or make the skins non tradable so they are just that, skins for you.
Counter Strike is 100% a Valve-operated casino for kids.
Lootboxes are literally gambling and redeeming them even look like slots.
Allowing the selling/trading of skins allows for a black market to emerge to convert them to currency. Valve created the conditions for this exploitive system to emerge and does nothing to stop it. You can debate whether valve has a duty to stop it but they are forever a black eye on gaming in my eyes. Just because they sell cheap games twice a year doesn’t white wash them
Fucking lol. The lengths you things go to. Just shaking my head at how fucking stupid you must think the average person is. What an incredibly hostile world you have to live in.
What?
Is that just clever wording or are the employees actually seeing bigger checks?
For once, it looks like the answer is that they do see some big checks. From an article someone posted further down the thread:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24197477/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-payroll-redacted
Lowest paid department is hardware, with an average of about $430k/employee.
Now, that is an average, and it's hard to tell from here if a few highly paid employees in each department are throwing that number off.
It's not 'clever wording', it says what it is - dividing profit by the number of employees results in a higher number for valve.
The heading isn't comparing employee paychecks,it's about overall company performance.
It's being phrased as an ROI per employee "asset", not as compensation per actual employee.
Gabe is pocketing most of this.
Cool story. Where is Half-Life 3?
Hey moneybags Gabe...where is Half-Life 3?
According to Valve itself Half Life 3 doesn't exist because they are out of ideas, Valve has always been a clan of tech wizards rather than writers
And they refuse to release a game unless it does something interesting. They don't want to be a game studio, but they will make a game to prove a point:
Their pace of game dev has reduced because the Steam service and hardware ventures are taking top priority. Why make a game when there's much more interesting stuff to do elsewhere that will drive the core business?
If you think there is ever going to be a HL3 then you are a sucker.
Gonna piggy back off this to drop a decent summary from coffeezilla about valve's lootbox gambling problem that Valve has consistently dodged responsibility on. It's really not new news but folks should be informed/reminded of it nonetheless.
I don't watch CoffeeZilla in any large amount, but this pretty well sums up the situation in this instance.
Honestly it's both valve's fault and the legal system. They've tried to combat these sites with the trade window system back in like 2015 2016 I think, but their csgo and tf2 trading economy struggles when you have to wait a week to do stuff.
It also doesn't help when a lot of these sites dodge being legally a casino, and get away with it.
I mean, we can point at the legal system, but as you said, casinos just find new loopholes to circumvent the law. Ultimately, Valve is the group with the power to remove any gambling-adjacent mechanics from their games, but they have been pretty flaccid regarding changes because they know that they will lose money from it.
Crackdowns won't stop the gambling on CS, legislation and enforcement won't change it, but making items non-tradeable, or damaging item value or appeal through any method, can stop the gambling - but at the cost of CS's financial success and overall appeal.
Lootboxes, such as the CounterStrikes lootboxes, have simply been banned in Belgium.
It's not too hard to do it legally.
No, they wanted to pretend like they were combating them while leaving them fully intact. There are pretty easy ways to combat it, but that also requires they destroy the market they profit so much off of. The trade window system (purposefully) did very little to stop this. It's was purely PR, which some gullible people actually believed.
People like Valve, so they believe everything they do is honest and good. It isn't. It may be better than some other companies, but it doesn't make them good. You can recognize when they do the right thing while also recognizing when they're doing the wrong things, and enabling gambling (underage or not) is bad. At a minimum, they control CS esports, so they could ban advertising from gambling sites if they don't want to block it in its entirety.
I'm not bothering watching all the video. I hope they highlight that a good part of the company clients are kids.
Yeah, underage gambling is a big part of the topic.