this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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Valve runs its massive PC gaming ecosystem with only about 350 employees (arstechnica.com)
submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

These stats don't include subcontractors and as such they're very misleading. For example, who do you think produces the GPUs inside the steam deck? Hint: it's not Valve.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Why would Valve produce their own GPU’s?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

My point being that while valve itself has only 350 employees, it subcontracts far more than that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Do we include the plumber that unclogs the toilets too?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

A better argument is who works on Proton compatibility? It's largely not Valve employees, yet that's a unique stack to Valve.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

It annoys me too that Valve is getting most of the credit for Proton while most of the work is actually done in winehq, dxvk... I'm sure Valve pays for some development here and there, and greases some developer wheels, but the main thing they do is being a front end for consumers.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I think you're discounting just how much they've invested and continue to invest in Proton/WINE. But they don't do lion's share of the development in-house, they mostly just pay devs to work on it, and yes, manage the FE in Steam. They're still a massive positive force for change in Windows game compatibility on Linux, and we'd be nowhere near where we are today without their investment.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I think you're discounting just how much they've invested and continue to invest in Proton/WINE

I'm not really sure I am... Do we have some actual numbers into how much money they've sunk in linux?
Gaming on linux is a huge community effort, whether it's wine, dxvk, vkd3d, mesa, linux itself... and plenty of smaller projects like lutris, bottles, UMU... And all this spans literal decades, far before valve ever got involved.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

AFAIK no, and we probably never will. But we do have glimpses into it, such as this article saying Valve directly paid >100 devs to work on Linux compat:

Griffais says the company is also directly paying more than 100 open-source developers to work on the Proton compatibility layer, the Mesa graphics driver, and Vulkan, among other tasks like Steam for Linux and Chromebooks.

I would imagine they still pay outside, open source devs to work on those initiatives, though maybe not as many since they've gotten past the initial push.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

AFAIK no, and we probably never will

They just might, open source financing is good PR. 100 is a fair bit more than i thought, thanks for the source.