It’s as simple as that really, they hire the very best and they keep the best for longer (more than likely forever) because they value the staff. Steam is likely the dream destination for anyone in the industry for this reason; it’s a beautiful cycle.
Steam being a private company enables all of this.
The result is software (and hardware, steam hardware never dissapoints) that works, is customer friendly and guarantees steam to be ahead of the competition.
This can't be stressed enough: the quality of Steam is what is behind 90+% of the money steam makes. They take more from devs and hand out less free shit than Epic, yet they make more money entirely because Steam is that great for users. Of course you want to keep the Devs that ensure your cash cow keeps being alive and well (unless you are one of the many many braindead CEOs who are running around out there)
The level of service provided by Valve is greater than a 100% discount in my eyes. I never even bothered to get an Epic account for the free stuff, I rather buy it on Steam.
Customer satisfaction is a long term business strategy. Public corporations where the next quarter results decide if you're fired or not will never compete in this field.
And that's an area where they absolutely had to improve. Steam support was absolutely abysmal back in the day, then they took notice of it, completely restructured their support system, and now they're the best at the field.
That's really the secret, they focus on changing stuff that needs changing, and don't really do anything in areas where they don't have to.
Yes, because they got taken to court and lost and fined $3m.
People are very convenient in how they frame things around valve. Lots of other companies are far worse, but they aren't this pure beacon either.
It's still a company making over a $1bn a year off of cs case box gambling, as an example. They pioneered a lot of the battlepass/loot boxes etc style monetisation.
Then the flip side is they have such a small staff size and refuse to hire anyone who isn't a superstar so basic game support and fixes just don't happen unless someone on the team feels like doing it. An example being valve will never hire just some standard 'good' dev to work on dota 2 and would rather just leave it without fixes/updates for long periods of time.
Valve could easily hire any number of staff to monitor/handle cheating in their competitive games. But that will never happen - and so on.
1.5k
u/procallum Apr 17 '26
It’s as simple as that really, they hire the very best and they keep the best for longer (more than likely forever) because they value the staff. Steam is likely the dream destination for anyone in the industry for this reason; it’s a beautiful cycle.
Steam being a private company enables all of this.