this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2024
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I hope the employees are compensated well compared to the profit.
As a private company with no board and stockholders to appease, with a guy in charge who is at least a descent person, employees at valve are doing fantastic. Way higher than "industry standards".
There is no decent billionaire
You could sort of say that, just because he is a billionaire, but unlike virtually any others, his money has come from no oppression or cheap labor or dirty money, or slavery or anything else. He hasn't drove up pricing, his employees are paid better than anywhere else, he doesn't exploit a need, and he doesn't use his money and position for political power.
So the only "not descent" thing he's really done involving that money, is having that money. But with his company being a private company, he can also keep that money as a security nest egg in case the company somehow falls on bad times and keep paying his employees.
I'd argue valve spearheading microtransactions was a bad thing, traceable to tf2 items and cases. People don't give them enough flak for filling games with monetization.
Honestly, the actual spearheading of microtransactions were physical collectible card game companies with games like MTG.
They made a free game and offered hats. I don't see anything predatory or wrong with charging for skins that don't make a game "pay to win" in a game that is free. Really, I call it the least terrible monetization form.
Exactly. The main problems are two-fold:
I don't have a problem with paid cosmetics, I have a problem with promoting gambling.
That said, I think Valve has done more good than bad, so I like them. I don't like everything they do though.
Tbh it's more the getting users to gamble by paying for cases that got the ball rolling. Objectively, the least terrible monetization form is buying a game outright and then earning your items through playing as they used to do before free to play became normalized. That's why all these shitty games come out with battle passes even though game developers did just fine supporting their game for a few years without the constant money churn. Because it's the norm, people now think it's impossible to have a game with updates that is bought outright, yet deep rock galactic does it just fine without $60/yr worth in battle passes.
But an online only game like team fortress? It doesn't jive well. You can't keep the servers going and the security and the anti cheat updated on a game that you pay once for unless you want the support and the game to be worthless two or three years after it was first released.
Your idea is great for single player games and noncompetitive team games like borderlands online play, and i own tons of games like that and its 90% of what i play. Not for games like team fortress, LoL, and Fortnite. For the latter games, it would mean support and servers would shut down while lots of people would still want to play them.
I played LoL quite a bunch over decade ago. Thousand+ hours over three years, probably. I spent a total of about $40. Had Hundreds of hours in on team fortress and never spent a dime.
It came from loot crates.
So don't buy loot crates if you don't want to.
Also, his money came from Half Life episodes 1 and 2, and creating what would be known as the "Steam" store and getting it downloaded on every PC with Half Life 2 on it. Loot boxes were side jobs that came way later.
Not really.
So insightful. Really contributes to the conversation.
As of 2021, Valve employees made roughly $430K-4.5M, depending on role. Not bad, considering the average salary in WA is around $58k.
Source:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24197477/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-payroll-redacted
Holy shit
Interesting. Looks like the hardware people are the lowest paid department.
Which maybe makes sense. They've started to see some success there, but not the way Steam or TF2 has.
They’re around a big city, so the Seattle metro is about $76k. Still great for the valve employees though.
It's a bit weird (skip to 10:41 for specifically the pay system)
I'll bet they all can afford a half-dozen yachts.