this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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Translation: When not accountable to greedy-ass shareholders, they don't have to do the whole "If you're not growing you're dying!" bullshit; and can just keep the employees they need without constantly expanding and enshittifying their services.
Steam is available in over two hundred countries and you think 100 employees is enough to manage that? To do the account support, billing support, vendor support, user content moderation, technical support, hardware partnerships, server management, platform development, legal compliance, business development, web development, database management, HR, accounting...etc in multiple regions and in every respective language? One employee per every two countries?! Figure it out.
Yes? Or at least ish. I mean, I agree they probably do some outsourcing, but I don't think they'd need to do much
They probably don't need much of a sales or marketing team, so that cuts down on people a lot. They have a flat hierarchy, so that means no middle management. They don't really have large customers, just a bunch of individuals, so they don't need customer success managers to manage relationships. HR would probably be run for all Valve employees, so it's not like they have HR employees JUST for the Steam team. Same goes for internal IT and infrastructure, so they probably aren't part of the 100. Probably same with legal. On top of that, IT, infra, and legal teams aren't usually all that big anyway. Like, decent chance that's ~10 people. Not saying it's a direct comparison, but I work at a company of ~200. We've got like, 2 legal people, 3 IT people, and 5 infra people. So yeah, ~10 seems reasonable given their size. That means the 100 can be focused almost entirely on development and support.
On top of that, there's a good chance they don't actually host a lot of their servers and DBs themselves, so they pay external vendors. I wouldn't really count paying external vendors "outsourcing", but I guess you could kinda make that argument. Same goes for translation/i18n - they're probably external vendors, but I wouldn't call that outsourcing. Same with a number of other services like that.
While there are plenty of things that change over time with Steam, the core platform is pretty stable and unchanging. So they probably have a core group of developers working on new features, and a decent chunk of people on things like vendor and hardware partnerships and support. Beyond that, they probably don't need a whole ton else.
And then yeah, there's probably some outsourcing - I'd imagine that's the case for customer support, maybe one or two other things. I agree they probably have some, but it's not like they'd have hundreds of outsourced jobs. Probably a few dozen.
This is a terrible way of thinking about it. Again, I work at a company of ~200. Not saying it's a direct comparison, but it's close enough. You know what we do when we need to support some additional languages/regions? Maybe update some code if there's something unique about the language or region, and then we.... Pay our translation service some extra. That's about it. We don't need to hire more employees for every single country we support, just pay a vendor some more money. And yeah, if it becomes a popular region, there's some more things you have to do. You probably hire a small team to handle management/business/partnerships in that region, but as I mentioned about, Valve probably doesn't have a ton of need for middle management and business people. So they can get by with even less. Then there's support and IT, so yeah, probably need a few people there and outsourcing for support. But like, that's a few people for a whole region, like the entire EU. You don't need to hire more people for every single country in the EU.
Not trying to say you're entirely off the mark, but you don't scale linearly as you grow. If you are a small startup of 50 people, maybe you have one or two HR people. That doesn't mean you hire one or two more for every 50 employees. You wait until you have 200, then hire one or two more. Then at 500 you hire one or two more, etc etc. Between that, Valve's unique internal structure, the fact that the Steam team is probably supported by Valve's employees, paying vendors for services you don't want to run internally, then yeah, they probably don't need to outsource too much.
Hey, you make a lot of great points and thanks for the perspective and depth of engagement. I think "paying vendors for services you don't want to run internally" is exactly outsourcing. With the ubiquity of big cloud services though, I hesitate to call that outsourcing even though it fits that definition. Maybe cause that's more about the hardware than the people, I dunno. I checked real quick and seems like they do have their own data centers but use AWS and others as well around the world.
I think I may have a different default definition of outsourcing than others though after working tech support in the US for bigger companies through other smaller outsourced companies in the US. A lot of people probably assumed I meant overseas as in outsourced tech support to India. I agree with your scaling estimates and most everything else you said. Someone's gotta design dem summer sale logos too though lol. Cheers.
Haha, thanks for the civil discussion too. Fair enough about the outsourcing. Have a great one
Steam has certainly degraded over the past 15 years, it just gets a pass because the pointless economies it created to capitalise on are player-driven: steam workshop & steam community market.
Neither offer something which didn't already exist, they just do so in a way which generates income for Valve. Including in ways that are predatory toward people predisposed to gambling etc behaviours, and enable exploitation by 3rd parties (which Valve also profits from)
What steam brought to the table was the first content delivery network for games. Digital Marketplaces were not a thing when Steam launched, and most software was still sold on store shelves. They are reliable, and customer friendly - that's why no other content delivery network has gotten any kind of foothold, because competitors consistently create platforms that are more difficult to navigate and screw customers over shortly after their launch by removing content or having some sort of major rights-issue.
Steam Workshop and Steam Community market account for almost nothing in the grand scheme of what makes Valve its money.
They have spent tons on developing the tools to play games on Linux through Proton, and have shown themselves to be enthusiasts themselves when it comes to supporting gamers with some of the more robust VR systems as well.
Its content delivery network for games existed without those things 15 years ago is my point. If the argument is that being privately run exempts them from the need for constant pointless expansion, there is no greater contradiction of that than examples where it expanded pointlessly. Systems which they hired an in-house economist to develop; whom rejects their modern implementations on the principles I described.
Also, GOG exists.
It dominates the market without any effort whatsoever to force companies to distribute exclusively through them or otherwise weaken competition because it's far and away the best out there.
And EGS (and EA Play, and Ubisoft, and GOG, and...) show that just making a functional launcher is far from trivial.
A launcher is an unnecessary contrivance of anti consumerism (DRM). GOG Galaxy is entirely optional.
That and the other launchers are a product of Steam's dominance, not a cause of it.
Steam only historically dominated GOG, snowballing off the success of their first-party titles & providing a platform for DRM where GOG chose not to.
Valve has done a lot of great things, I'm not seeking to argue against that. To argue it hasn't become artificially bloated for purposes of maximising profit over the years seems silly, though.
Steam doesn't require DRM.
The launcher is a massive value add, pretty much singlehandedly responsible for PC being a relevant gaming platform at all, and the features (that you can easily ignore) are also huge value adds to a significant number of people. There are no features that are "bloat". There are things I don't personally care about, but all of them are the single reason some measurable chunk of users prefers steam over anything else.
Steam/Steamworks is DRM. You can't purchase games on Steam and play them independently of Steam.
The overlay, the community pages, reviews, friends chat etc were all there circa 2010 and function identically to how they do today. Regional pricing was there too, today it's been reneged in many countries to protect against region-spoofing.
The primary group of people who prefer Steam only for Steam Workshop and/or Community Market are those who seek to extract profit from them. There were paid mods before Steam Workshop and it was fine. There were digital collectibles inside games before Steam Community Market and it was fine. There wasn't any skin gambling, though.
These systems are designed to provide functions which already existed, but with Valve taking a cut of the sales. That is a profit-adding for Valve, and literally value-reducing for consumers. They are popular because they are bundled with a popular pre-existing service, that's it.
There are plenty of games that are entirely DRM free and can be played straight from the EXE.
Steam Workshop is a massive value add. The premise that it's not is a joke. Not every game has a community that distributes mods that way, but it's by far the easiest way to add mods, and the people who value steam for Workshop absolutely have nothing at all to do with extracting profit.
The game studios have an option when publishing the game through them to use their DRM, there are a ton of games that allow you to run it with steam off or even uninstalled from the PC, it's just a lot of games choose to include the steam drm on it (usually to allow for steam achievements as that is not possible without it to my knowledge), sadly steam does not provide a good way of identifying what games do this and what games don't. I believe you may be able to check this by checking the games executable in the install location to see if it uses the steam schema