Does anyone know how Valve rate on privacy? Do they aggressively data mine and sell it in the surveillance economy?
I wonder if they’re also getting paid more or does greedy Gabe just take it all to fund his mega yachts.
Did a little digging, apparently in a 2021 lawsuit, documents were released with bad redactions (they blacked out over the data, but the underlying information was still able to be highlighted and copied/pasted. Very common error when redacting PDFs)
I haven’t checked the data myself but according one user this was the breakdown:
“Total staff as of 2021: 336 people
Administration: 35 people making an average of 4.5 million a year
Game Developers: 181 people making an average of 1 million a year
Steam Developers: 79 people making an average of 960k a year
Hardware Developers: 41 people making average of 430k a year”
Normally I would guess that “average” here probably means a few people making a ton of money while others get shafted. But I think “admin” probably accounts for that. We have no official way of knowing the true breakdown since this info is not supposed to be public
This actually seems like not a terrible spread. The average for the top earners is a little more than 10x the average for the lowest earners… Obviously outliers could be skewing that data (there could be one hardware developer making 30 million while the others work for poverty wages) but from the data we have, this isn’t nearly as wide a gap as I would have expected.
The lowest earners making the company work aren’t mentioned here. It’s probably an external company cleaning the toilets, for hourly rates you probably don’t want to know.
Valve moved into hardware long after its other ventures, so it’s not surprising the hardware devs make less – they’re newer. Still, $430k/yr is an enviable salary…
This was from 2021, so prior to the Steam Deck… that was really their break-out moment, I think, with regards to hardware. The Steam Link and Steam Controller were neat but didn’t really capture their respective markets, and the Index was widely considered one of the best VR headsets on the market but that’s a relatively small market, and it priced out all but the enthusiast tier consumers. The Steam Deck on the other hand had mass appeal and basically ushered in a golden age of handheld PC gaming… not to mention the immense hype around their recent hardware announcements. Could be that their hardware team is making more now.
No no Gabe just works 31.244.670 times as much as his employees.
Hey that’s not fair.
Gabe is also spending all that money on Aston Martins Valkyries to race around the world.
capitalism gonna capitalism, man. you know the answer.
To be fair, Valve only has around 350 employees. The other companies have thousands more.
Valve still makes a ton of money from kids gambling. They don’t care about anything else than money and yet gamers keeps kissing their ass.
Call me a shill, but Valve’s actions indicate that they care about the money that comes from improving a product or service. That differentiates them from many publicly traded companies that care about money at the expense of the quality of their own products and services.
That tends to happen when you have a monopoly on an industry where you get 30% of the revenue from other people’s hard work.
