336 people
30% grabbed from every game
8.56 billion in revenue
The service they privide to devs and customers is worth it, but valve doesn’t even really take 30% anyway. Watch pirate software’s video on it.
8.56 billion in revenue
And that’s just estimated from sales on the platform. AFAIK, they have never publicly stated their actual earnings.
Damn, working for Valve pays very well.
What a great company!
Because they don’t pay any of their actual workforce: the game devs they steal 30% from for every game sold.
You mean the game devs that they take 30% from in a contract the devs agree to in order to list their game on the largest PC gaming store?
Besides that, steam has an incredibly low financial requirement to start selling your games on their platform. $100 usd per game (at least in the US) and you get it back if your game sells enough copies (100 maybe? I forget tbh.) It’s a great platform for indie devs which is why we’ve seen indie PC gaming boom so much in the past decade or so especially.
Well said.
You mean the game devs they provide CDN at no additional costs, networking features a dev environment that is far more comfortable than any competitor and various additional revenue streams (such as trading cards and items)?
It’s still stealing if the profit is this extremely high. Of course a successful business includes providing a useful product. But if you make so much more money per employee than any other company, that means the amount you’re charging is disproportional. They could change Steam fees to 5% and still be extremely profitable. They choose not to because of greed.
This is not me condemning them by the way, I think their greed and what they do with the money available to them is still mostly better than what other people do, but it’s still greed.
I define all excessive profit as stealing. In an ideal world everyone would be earning roughly the same. (Or no earning being necessary at all, but I don’t want to go into every detail)
So am I stealing from my employer because I earn more than the cost of my bills?
Who said anything about costs/bills? I’m talking about excessive wealth extraction. If a group of people gets massively wealthy by taking lots of money from other people, one should wonder if they really need all that money.
But where do you draw the line? Don’t get me wrong, I am against the idea of, as you say, “excessive wealth extraction”. But what classes as excessive? If I ran an independent Etsy shop making cards, and I had an 80% profit margin, is that stealing?
I should also like to point out:
I define all excessive profit as stealing.
All profit is excessive by nature, isn’t it?
But what classes as excessive?
That’s a good question, one that I have not defined for myself perfectly.
I think part of it is the nature of the transaction. When you sell something off your Etsy shop, you create a thing, you sell the thing, you can’t sell the thing again. A shop like Steam continuously takes money from you for the exact same service. Of course it takes money to run the servers and any other running costs, and I’m not saying those shouldn’t be covered. But theoretically, if they have set their automated systems well, Steam runs by itself without intervention from anyone. Whoever owns Steam basically makes money on their sleep. They created it once and it continually makes money for them.
When a game sells well, this game will be downloaded more often, so the relative load/usage of the Steam servers increases. So it is fair to take more money from games that sell better, so tying it to “amount of games sold” makes sense. But does the load on the Steam servers really change if a game is sold for 50€ or 10€? No, what really matters is the size of the game, the amount of updates the developers push and so on. So tying the costs to sale price is also not necessarily fair.
Apart from that, it’s hard to define something as “excessive” without comparing it to other things. As I mentioned once, I don’t think a teacher is doing a less valuable job than a CEO of some big company. Most jobs are benefitting others/society in some way, so I actually value most jobs roughly the same. In conclusion, I would define as “excessive” anything that is a large deviation from mean income, completely arbitrarily I might say if your income is more than double the mean, it would be excessive.
All profit is excessive by nature, isn’t it?
I don’t necessarily think so. People die, so their accumulated wealth disappears or is transferred to someone else. Human beings are made to acquire more resources. But death is a natural endpoint to this process. There is probably an equilibrium point of profit that is sustainable with a certain population.
If the amount of money massively outweighs your bills, then I would say yes. Also if your “bills” are extreme luxury, then even without that. We really need to stop with this massive wealth inequality. Our economy works on transactions. If the profit margin on any transaction (including labor) is exorbitantly high, then something is going wrong. An investment banker is not more valuable than a teacher. A CEO is not more valuable than a janitor.
lol
How much is the profit? 30% is revenue not profit.
Why is money per employee a useful metric? One would expect most costs of a store like steam to be in hardware and network not in labor.
Exactly. The question is how much is really necessary to operate that service. We as a species really need to stop thinking about constant growth and more and more wealth, and that includes growth and wealth that is “reasonable” compared to other extremely greedy people. Right now it looks like Steam is growing to infinity and making more and more money. They’re the same like everyone else trying to make more and more money. Of course they’re more ethical and they return value for that money, but they’re still part of the same system of infinite growth that is not sustainable.
This infinite growth is happening because they extract more value than they require. If they extracted as much value as they require to sustain their business, they wouldn’t grow. But of course constant growth is what everyone expects and thus no one sees a problem with it.
I see it as stealing.
It isn’t 30% profit. It’s a 30% charge. Servers, broadband connections, etc… are expensive. Those numbers may be pulled out of someone’s ass, so I don’t know their veracity, but 30% might not be too much.
This is a thread about how Valve makes over 8 billion dollars despite basically all their revenue coming from an in-game store that sells other people’s content. Of course its too much.
Do they bank 8 billion dollars or does 8 billion dollars make its way from our hands to theirs. There is a difference. How much of that 8 billion goes to managing infrastructure?
In fact:
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/547025/steam-game-sales-revenue/
To be clear, I agree that the way our model works is broken. Wall street and infinite profit gains can only work so long until the system collapses, and Steam is a part of this. Some of the statements made here are just not factual and I feel the need to be pedantic, because I don’t believe that spreading misinformation will help anything. Attack CEO pay disparity or something useful and true.
Edit: I woke up and answered you without fully reading your post. Apologies, I didn’t answer you point, because I was on a soap box. The point still stands that the revenue they make could very well be going to infrastructure costs, necessitating a charge for using their store that is on everyone’s computer. If all you have is potato servers then what quality will the store front be?
I stand my last paragraph in the above, especially the last sentence.
“steal” lol.
As if people are forced to publish there.
They can even list there and sell Steam keys on their website and not pay any of that to Valve, with the only stipulation that Steam keys cannot be sold for less than on Steam itself.
So basically:
- You don’t need to publish there
- But if you do, you can still publish elsewhere
- And you can sell Steam keys directly with no cut to Valve
You only pay the 30% cut for sales made through Steam.
That’s incredibly reasonable.
There aren’t many option and all of them except one are predatory. Regulation that would limit the amount taken would be a real boon to the industry. Steam, Epic, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are all guilty of this. The government should step in but they don’t because of lobbying and donations.
No one defends Microsoft when it comes to this. Gaben gets a free pass because he pretends to be a cool guy when he’s just another billionaire essentially robbing his workforce and customers.
Steam is the only store putting the customer first. The refund policy is top notch. Heck just making proton, giving gamers the choice of os, is the best thing for gamers since computers was invented!
Putting the customer first? Call me when I can transfer my license to anyone else I want without valve having to okay it like I can a physical copy then we are talking about putting the customer first.
That they are miles better then the competition, does not mean there are no room for improvements.
Microsoft’s refund policy is top notch too and I see proton as leveraging open source to avoid dev costs.
More importantly, everything steam does could be done with 5% instead of 30% and Gaben would still be filthy rich.
Steam is as greedy as the other platforms and it’s us, the consumers, and the indie scene that suffer for it. Are you okay with your favorite indie studio closing and your favorite game not getting a sequel because Gaben wants 8000 million a year instead of 1000 million a year?
There is most likely collusion and soft monopolies, these platforms are clearly not competing in good faith.
Dude, unless you’ve ever tried publishing your own game you should stop parroting stuff you hear online. I’ve released a (borderline shovelware) game I made for educational purposes, and steam is god damned amazing and has such good support for a novice like myself. On the complete opposite of what you’re claiming, the gamers and indie companies stand to gain the most from a service like steam.
It’s not surprising that it’s more or less only people from huge companies like blizzard and Ubisoft who complain and try to gaslight Valve. If I were to release a game again I’d rather publish it on steam if they took 60% of the cut than anywhere else. (Unless you want to pay me a godly amount of money for exclusivity Epic Games, then hmu lol)
proton as leveraging open source to avoid dev costs
As a developer, I have no problem with this. Why do work that doesn’t need to be done?
Hold up, how is proton leveraging open source to avoid dev costs? Are you referring to steam using and contributing to existing projects instead of reinventing the wheel? Or to game developers that use it as a reason for not making native Linux versions, which wouldn’t be Valve’s workforce in the first place?
I can see how the things Valve does contribute to their business model - steam input giving their controller compatibility with games, proton letting them launch a Linux-based handheld, and the new recording feature probably there for the steam deck… But the thing is, Valve is still providing all those things to customers for no extra charge, and they keep adding new stuff.
This thread contains a lot of great bangers. But let’s play devil’s advocate for just a minute.
Let me know when you build a global distribution platform with 5-9 uptime, credit card processing, full compliance with all of the various laws in all the countries you serve and also provide a cdn for my game for free.
I’ll be waiting. You better pull through on this, you owe the community your labor
Taking a different and hopefully more productive stance than the other guy, I just want to explore people’s thoughts.
People already have built these alternatives. Itch.io, EGS, Humble Store, Microsoft Store, GOG. These platforms exist, but they struggle to achieve the full market dominance that Steam has as the “default” platform, meaning Devs are borderline forced to accept the 30% cut if they have any hope of making sales.
As shown by Steam’s huge profits, they certainly take a higher cut than they have to, and they can definitely stomach a smaller cut
I’ve made a comment before in the past when dealing with game publishing. All of the things Steam provides, including worldwide distribution to a lot of regions EGS, MS store, etc don’t sell in because of a variety of laws, Steam just does better.
You pay less because you get less. I’m selling a product. The last thing I’m going to cheap out in is sales. I’m not going to see great sales from the EGS because A)Nobody uses it and B) the shopping experience is terrible. I don’t have access to the same makers and (hearsay) the actual process of getting your game distributed is a pain. I wouldn’t know, I don’t sell on EGS.
Further, we were having a conversation about a problem that doesn’t exist. You’re more than welcome to use Steam and other storefronts.
Hell, you can handle all of the sales yourself AND put it on steam. Most people will buy it on steam simply because that’s where all of the customers are.
Asking Steam to lower their prices because that’s where you’d make the most money is a mind bender.
It’s like trying to sell your hand made Combs. The gas station on the corner is happy to take only 20% of the profit. They’re all over the place and accessible. But you really want to sell it at the boutique shops because they have more comb-seeking customers. But then when they ask for 30% of sales, you balk and tell them that’s too high and they should lower their cut to that of the gas station.
You pay less because you get less. I’m selling a product. The last thing I’m going to cheap out in is sales. I’m not going to see great sales from the EGS because A)Nobody uses it
That’s exactly it, Devs have to accept Steam’s cut because it’s essentially the only place you can sell things. It makes logical sense, but do you not see why this is a disadvantageous position for the Devs to be put in?
It’s like trying to sell your hand made Combs. The gas station on the corner is happy to take only 20% of the profit. They’re all over the place and accessible. But you really want to sell it at the boutique shops because they have more comb-seeking customers.
This would be a fine analogy, if there weren’t a single digit amount of storefronts. Steam and EGS are more equivalent to supermarkets. Sure the odd person is going to go to speciality stores on occasion, but the vast majority of sales are done through supermarkets. Steam is a supermarket competing against speciality stores. The only other real supermarket in town is EGS and as you’ve discussed, it’s such a dumpster fire no one shops there.
I’m not disagreeing that Steam deserves its position, it does for sure. But we live in a world where it has no meaningful competition, and one of the ways it exercises its position is by maintaining their 30% cut. A cut which was established by stores that had to manage the logistics for real physical copies of the games.
My point is that there isn’t a reason that Steam has such a high cut, other than it wants more money, and has the market saturation to command more money
Me: “Rent seeking is an illegitimate practice, landlords steal money from laborers by extorting them for a necessary good!”
You: “Oh yeah? Why don’t you just buy your own land and build your own apartment building?”
You’re a dumbass.
Lmao, thanks for demonstrating my point for me better than I ever could.
What point? That you’re a corporate bootlicker?
That you’re like, 12 years old? Or at least have the fundamental world view of a 12 year old.
Fukkin lmao “steam is a necessity they owe me to make it cheaper”
Get the fuck back to reddit child. Enjoy your block.
You’re the type of person who would call universal healthcare “socialism”, and it really shows.
How is Valve supposed to pay for the infrastructure and maintenance without charging devs for using their enormous platform? I’m genuinely curious what ideas you have. Disregard everyone’s non-sequiturs here, please.
By charging 3% instead of 30%? Do you really think their servers cost $8.5b? Does the work to distribute a game and process payment equal 30% of the labor required to make a game?
A more advanced answer would be a cost plus profit model, so if it costs Valve $1 to transfer 1TB of data transfer (in terms of server costs), then charge $1.10 for 1TB. That’s obviously very difficult to calculate though I bet Valve has some internal metric of costs.
Valve today does the exact thing Unity was trying to do, charging a percent of revenue for providing infrastructure. Unity got raked over the coals for it.
Unity was changing the rules after they were already set in place. Valve has never done such a move.
Imagine though if steam suddenly went to a flat fee per install instead of charging the 30% of the sale on their platform.
They would rightly be raked over the coals. But they won’t make such a dumb fucking move because it’s a dumb fucking move.
I’m not one for Corpos but as far as attacking them goes valve is certainly near the bottom of the list.
They would rightly be raked over the coals. But they won’t make such a dumb fucking move because it’s a dumb fucking move.
What a wild thing to assert without any reasoning.
Side note: Valve isn’t doing the thing Unity tried to do. Unity tried to charge you every time someone installs the game. And you’re not even hosting the game’s data on Unity’s servers.
Steam takes money when you purchase, then will let you download it for free, anytime, anywhere, and on any device. Completely different.
Back on topic: It would be really interesting to see the actual server and bandwidth costs for hosting and distributing all those games. There’s no way it’s super low, or any of the competition surely would have caught up by now.
If you don’t want a publisher to take a cut: self-publish. Every publisher takes a cut. Valve just takes 10% more than everyone else, while also providing more tools and support than anyone else to those devs.
Valve just takes 10% more than everyone else
What do you mean? 30% is used by almost every digital store.
Since when? Valve’s 30% has always been contentious because everyone else had only been 15-20%. It’s the main thing Tim Sweeny constantly whines about.
Since 2019 then? So Sweeny is an even bigger wiener than I thought.
To be clear, that thirty percent was the going rate for stores back when Steam started - not just since 2019.
I don’t know where you’re getting the 15-20 percent thing.
Valve is not a publisher they are a store. The percentage they take is in line with every other digital store, except itch.io Also compared to releasing in brick and mortar stores that percentage is low.
Valve is both a publisher and developer.
Steam is a store.
A publisher is merely any individual or business that makes others’ works available for sale. Valve does this through Steam.
Okay Valve is also a publisher but how many games have they published from outside developers? The only one I can think of is Garry’s mod and a Portal spin-offs. So it’s virtually impossible to get your game published by Valve the publisher. The person above said that Valve takes a 30% cut, they were obviously referring to the store fee. But then you replied “don’t work with a publisher then” Which doesn’t make sense since Valve only publishes their own games.
Okay Valve is also a publisher but how many games have they published from outside developers?
Literally every game on Steam that isn’t their own. 🤦♂️
It sounds like you don’t know what publishing means.
Dude running a store isn’t publishing. 🤦♂️Like a book publisher and a book store are two different things. I work in the games industry nobody says that their games are published by Valve when they put their games on Steam. Valve does digital distribution which is different from publishing. Does Valve make the store art for each game, write the marketing blurb and game description, do they create a press release and contact journalists/streamers for each game and create the trailer for each game? No Valve does non of that, since that’s the job of the publisher the developer works with. Steam has literally a text field on each game page that says who the publisher of each game is and only on Valve games it says that the publisher is Valve. Sounds like you don’t know what publishing means.
I prefer not to buy games on steam, and when a game is available from another channel (for example Factorio is available on the devs’ website) I will buy it there. And yet, most games are only on steam, so the devs really don’t seem to care about trying to avoid that 30% cut when they can.
Tell me you know nothing about the gaming industry without telling me lol
Gabe is the smartest guy in business. Guy is rolling in cash, only for himself and those he choose to share it with.
Idk what they teach you in business school, but it’s probably wrong.
i took one year of business school, and they teach you to offshore outsource as much as possible and to prioritize your shareholders at all costs. so, nothing surprising.
Ah, good old American business
It’s just the Jack Welch playbook over and over. Even though people finally started to realize Jack was a fucking idiot and ruined GE.
He got rich. But fucked one of the most well known and respected companies in the world doing it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
As spotted by SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik, some data in the document was viewable despite the black redaction boxes, including Valve’s headcount and gross pay across various parts of the company over 18 years, and even some data about its gross margins that we weren’t able to uncover fully.
The data breaks Valve employees into four different groups: “Admin,” “Games,” “Steam,” and, starting in 2011, “Hardware.”
If you want to sift through the numbers yourself, I’ve included a full table of the data, sorted by year and category, at the end of this story.
In November 2023, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais told The Verge that he thinks “we’re firmly in the camp of being a full fledged hardware company by now.”
The small number of staff across the board seemingly explains why Valve’s product list is so limited despite its immense business as basically the de facto PC gaming platform.
While we haven’t seen any leaked profit numbers from this new headcount and payroll data, the figures give a more detailed picture of how much Valve is spending on its staff — which, given the massive popularity of Steam, is probably still just a fraction of the money the company is pulling in.
The original article contains 620 words, the summary contains 201 words. Saved 68%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Im struggling to convince myself if I should read the article and see if some actual numbers were ever mentioned.
There’s an entire table on there.
The total number is even in the first paragraph. Not the best summary I’ve ever seen.
Valve employee data, 2003 - 2021 Year Category [Presumably: Gross pay] [Presumably: Number of employees] 2003 Admin $454,142 5 2004 Admin $548,833 8 2005 Admin $11,644,172 9 2006 Admin $7,905,166 11 2007 Admin $1,997,107 12 2008 Admin $19,519,296 14 2009 Admin $20,300,752 18 2010 Admin $34,754,590 19 2011 Admin $35,216,732 22 2012 Admin $68,925,186 24 2013 Admin $48,462,690 20 2014 Admin $90,406,510 23 2015 Admin $91,496,697 24 2016 Admin $95,444,499 35 2017 Admin $83,146,640 38 2018 Admin $103,479,550 39 2019 Admin $109,720,296 39 2020 Admin $118,435,121 39 2021 Admin $157,999,567 35 2003 Games $3,933,064 57 2004 Games $4,471,342 61 2005 Games $18,122,549 81 2006 Games $17,260,260 97 2007 Games $12,768,984 100 2008 Games $39,677,549 136 2009 Games $44,076,164 148 2010 Games $66,201,302 173 2011 Games $68,173,834 175 2012 Games $135,484,323 186 2013 Games $107,654,658 188 2014 Games $152,351,554 185 2015 Games $181,769,451 160 2016 Games $174,660,830 175 2017 Games $221,488,403 184 2018 Games $216,249,204 192 2019 Games $236,798,782 201 2020 Games $199,306,798 189 2021 Games $192,355,985 181 2003 Steam $1,038,091 16 2004 Steam $1,113,136 16 2005 Steam $2,840,825 23 2006 Steam $3,424,485 29 2007 Steam $3,128,634 34 2008 Steam $5,053,283 40 2009 Steam $7,339,922 51 2010 Steam $17,732,609 60 2011 Steam $16,369,045 101 2012 Steam $42,966,257 127 2013 Steam $44,515,505 128 2014 Steam $52,338,579 119 2015 Steam $72,391,837 142 2016 Steam $56,390,975 125 2017 Steam $64,945,395 102 2018 Steam $70,814,165 82 2019 Steam $66,481,253 80 2020 Steam $71,752,682 82 2021 Steam $76,446,633 79 2011 Hardware $2,252,828 7 2012 Hardware $3,460,641 14 2013 Hardware $5,369,203 20 2014 Hardware $10,180,424 27 2015 Hardware $12,396,140 27 2016 Hardware $11,001,217 36 2017 Hardware $16,724,365 39 2018 Hardware $19,578,951 47 2019 Hardware $15,831,572 47 2020 Hardware $12,008,996 31 2021 Hardware $17,706,376 41
needed some formatting:
Valve employee data, 2003 - 2021
Year Category [Presumably: Gross pay] [Presumably: Number of employees]
2003 Admin $454,142 5
2004 Admin $548,833 8
2005 Admin $11,644,172 9
2006 Admin $7,905,166 11
2007 Admin $1,997,107 12
2008 Admin $19,519,296 14
2009 Admin $20,300,752 18
2010 Admin $34,754,590 19
2011 Admin $35,216,732 22
2012 Admin $68,925,186 24
2013 Admin $48,462,690 20
2014 Admin $90,406,510 23
2015 Admin $91,496,697 24
2016 Admin $95,444,499 35
2017 Admin $83,146,640 38
2018 Admin $103,479,550 39
2019 Admin $109,720,296 39
2020 Admin $118,435,121 39
2021 Admin $157,999,567 35.
2003 Games $3,933,064 57
2004 Games $4,471,342 61
2005 Games $18,122,549 81
2006 Games $17,260,260 97
2007 Games $12,768,984 100
2008 Games $39,677,549 136
2009 Games $44,076,164 148
2010 Games $66,201,302 173
2011 Games $68,173,834 175
2012 Games $135,484,323 186
2013 Games $107,654,658 188
2014 Games $152,351,554 185
2015 Games $181,769,451 160
2016 Games $174,660,830 175
2017 Games $221,488,403 184
2018 Games $216,249,204 192
2019 Games $236,798,782 201
2020 Games $199,306,798 189
2021 Games $192,355,985 181.
2003 Steam $1,038,091 16
2004 Steam $1,113,136 16
2005 Steam $2,840,825 23
2006 Steam $3,424,485 29
2007 Steam $3,128,634 34
2008 Steam $5,053,283 40
2009 Steam $7,339,922 51
2010 Steam $17,732,609 60
2011 Steam $16,369,045 101
2012 Steam $42,966,257 127
2013 Steam $44,515,505 128
2014 Steam $52,338,579 119
2015 Steam $72,391,837 142
2016 Steam $56,390,975 125
2017 Steam $64,945,395 102
2018 Steam $70,814,165 82
2019 Steam $66,481,253 80
2020 Steam $71,752,682 82
2021 Steam $76,446,633 79.
2011 Hardware $2,252,828 7
2012 Hardware $3,460,641 14
2013 Hardware $5,369,203 20
2014 Hardware $10,180,424 27
2015 Hardware $12,396,140 27
2016 Hardware $11,001,217 36
2017 Hardware $16,724,365 39
2018 Hardware $19,578,951 47
2019 Hardware $15,831,572 47
2020 Hardware $12,008,996 31
2021 Hardware $17,706,376 41
There are no actual numbers. There are gross payroll numbers and number of employees per high level department, but no indication of how that’s distributed or if it includes things like benefits. Basically useless info in a vacuum
"Hardware,” to my surprise, has been a relatively small part of the company, with just 41 employees paid a gross of more than $17 million in 2021
That’s the only one I saw that meant anything that useful. They have ~10x that for game development but no indication of number of people there, and 79 people working on Steam.
Number of employees working on games is in the list at the bottom of the article. 181 as of 2021.
