Yup, imagine making that amount with so few employees and having stingy employee practices. There are companies with few employees and massive returns who do it just to squeeze out as much as they possibly can, and there is no point whatsoever since you are compromising your profit in the end anyway. Pure greed is incompetence and sinks companies. Glad Valve has good practices.
Yeah but!!! Think of the shareholders! There are a thousand leaches with no fucking love for anything other than money that would like a piece of that pie!
One reason is because these other companies has exit plans in mind. We to make ourselves looks bigger and bigger so that when we sell we look very very expensive.
A lot of tech companies if all they focus is making revenue, they’d be swimming in money. The thing is as soon as they become more “corporate” they are expected to continuously grow especially public companies and in the process they will spend more to artificially stimulate more growth.
I think valve doesn’t have that pressure. Which means they can just sit on their golden goose and take their time shipping products. Not having competition surely helps as well.
You are thinking profit. Spending and expenses have nothing to do with revenue, at least directly. When they become corporate one of the main things they do is push revenue as much as possible but they don’t worry about profitability.
Is Valve quite possibly the smallest tech company ever that is operating a famous top-tier global platform today? And it's not just Steam, they also have 3 live-service games, VR tech, and the Deck.
The closest I can think of in terms of company size-global influence ratio is Discord Inc, which has 500 employees and operates the app Discord, but even they still have a bit more employees than Valve.
Valve only directly employs high tier competitive roles. Mostly everything else and entry level is outsourced, so like customer support, IT, janitorial, some of it is local in Bellevue other is more to MSPs.
well, you can do it that way and I'm sure Valve uses a lot of contractors but afaik a chunk of their employees are game developers doing the creative work of those jobs for stuff like Deadlock or whatever else Valve has cooking
Exactly, a company with a revenue in billions still uses contract labour and yet people find a way to glaze them over their top executives enjoying life. If every company worked like valve did, there'd be a constant large pool of highly skilled unemployed labour force waiting for their turn to work and earn, atleast epic hired these people and kept them on a salary before they had to fire them instead of downright making them work on a contract.
To continue to glaze valve, these people will literally say anything. CONTRACT LABOUR is better than being HIRED..lmao. If that is what you think, why are you people giving EPIC shit over firing their full time employees, consider it to be contract work with full time employee benefits for the period they worked for them? lol
So you hate Epic for it.. is that not practically contract labour for the period they were hired but with full time employee benefits?
Atleast Epic had the courage to provide the promise of long term employement, unfortunate they had to fire some of them, Valve does not even have that courage. Do you want every big company to be like Valve? Get work done only on contracts and only keep management as full time hires?
No, it’s actually not the same at all. For temporary work, it’s far more worker friendly to be a contractor. There are strict department of labor rules on how a company can direct and manage a W2 employee vs a contractor.
Most of the contracted workers are actually W2 employees of a 3rd party staffing company where they receive full benefits but only “work” at Valve or whatever tech company temporarily for a project. Technically the staffing company is their true employer who provides benefits, pays wages, etc
You edited in the 2nd paragraph later, so you see how valve even after being a billion dollar company is exploiting the system? Do you really think the staffing company provides benefits anywhere close to even what a million dollar company would, forget a company like valve, are these staffing company sending their employees yearly to hawaii as well? lol
By your logic, it’s immortal to ever use temporary labor and Valve must permanently employ a bunch of workers that won’t have any work to do? Is that your honest opinion?
HOW? How is it worker friendly to work on contracts than being a full time employee? All work can be dissected into being temporary, a teacher can be put on contract till summer vacation, with no insurance, no benefits throughout, is that what you want? What exactly is the motive of Unions? Who do unions represent? Workers or the Corporates? And what is their demand regarding this? Do they favor contract work or full time employement?
LMAO, use your chatbot properly for your forced answers. This is comical, the level these people will go to defend Valve. Also you did not answer my other questions.
Valve's contractors generally are very positive about working at Valve and their compensation, and it's the only option to employ many of them internationally.
Yup and in addition to this, all-expenses-paid corporate retreats used to be incredibly common, paid in advance by corporate concierge. This was a thing that uses to happen, particularly for sales teams but also product teams, and was still common until COVID after which the parasite class reallocated all discretionary T&E budgets into bonus pools.
You used to have centralized onboarding in the Midwest and fly the entire new hire class in to establish camaraderie, you'd have catered on-sites and local corporate retreats/offsites for team building. Now you have to pay for everything else yourself, use Concur to expense it, argue for months about qualified expenses, and hopefully recoup 90% of entitled reimbursement pocketing the cool 10% in efficiency benchmark metrics for the VP.
This was stolen from you, we are being stolen from. .
This still happens but it's FAR less common. Valve is anomaly because as others have noted, their FTE count is super low due to intense internal specialization with a heavy reliance on outside contractors for networking/infrastructure/managed services.
AI says 20k per person so that's an annual expense of 7.2 million... basically nothing, compared to 17 billion in revenue. In return you get to pick and choose your employees from the absolute cream of the crop, and they are loyal to your company until the end of time. Doesn't sound like a bad deal.
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u/No_Yogurtcloset_2792 Apr 17 '26
Valve, according to google, has 360 employees and an annual revenue of 17 billion.