Court documents show that not only is Valve a fraction the size [only 336 employees in 2021] of companies like EA or Ubisoft, it's smaller than a lot of triple-A developers

Valve is an online store first and foremost. Apples and oranges. The rest are playing catchup, as they've seen gabe get rich and fat, and they want in on that.

they've seen gabe get rich and fat
Hey, that's not true! Gabe's lost a lot of weight in recent times.
- Yeah let's keep this civil
- Gaben made a deal with the devil, $10,000,000 for every pound lost! That's the real story here!
- And he is still fat. No longer morbidly obese, but definitely fat
Me and Gabe be like
Valve is a multi-faceted company with its hands in many pies.
- New euphemism for fat.

I think that is one reason why Valve has remained dominant in this space for over 20 years.

I suspect wolfire is a useful idiot with a larger company funding this lawsuit. Whether or not the antitrust case has legs, this will cost valve money which is a win for whoever they may be.

Just conjectue o course. I know though that if steam were destroyed tomorrow only terrible more expensive garbage would come in its place.

So go go gaben

If Wolfire kept up Humble Indie Bundle instead of it being sold to IGN and losing any semblance of "indie" I'd take the complaint more seriously
I do really like Lugaru, but still
I am very ashamed that I own a single wolfire title.
- I like receiver tho :\
- I like Wolfire. Their head (David Rosen) had a really good procedural animation talk at GDC about a decade ago, their games are pretty good, and they started up Humble before it spun off on its own.
  Before tarnishing their reputation, I'd suggest reading up on the actual complaints put forth in the lawsuit. I've done so extensively, I think they have very solid grounds to go after Valve (Valve's behaviour is comparable to Amazon's in terms of anticompetitive practices).

Don't need that many employees to run a store, programmers/IT and marketing and you're good to go. Employees wouldn't count contractors either so they probably have a lot more "employees" than that.

Not only that, Valve has done a TON of work to outsource as much of the process of running Steam off to the users and developers. Self-publishing, a minimum of manual moderation, automated greenlight processes, automated ratings, database tags, controller configs...
Their entire business model is to make money with as little effort as possible. I've been saying for ages that people vastly underestimate how ruthlessly profitable their business is. We didn't have the numbers, but we roughly knew this is what was going on.
- Gabe owns six yachts, people should always keep that in mind when praising him, he's not the friend of the average Joe, he just realized there's profit to be made by not pissing people off, but he's still making enough profit from us to be a billionaire while the majority of people live paycheck to paycheck.
Could use a few to develop a new linux distribution for entirely new markets and use cases, design and manufacture innovative cutting edge consumer hardware, and count to three.
- I'm surprised they didn't really try to make Steam OS a real distro for regular PCs, but at the same time there's no real money to be made...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution https://distrowatch.com/search.php?status=All
  There are almost one thousand distros. What's one more?

Well that explains why they don't make many games.

I heard half life alyx was pretty good. I also heard rumors that they're making a TF2 successor. Also, didn't a new counter-strike just come out?
Still, you have a point. Artifact was a disgusting trend-chasing cashgrab. They still haven't commented on Half life 3, which is despicable behavior imo.
- Don't let any TF2 fan hear you call Deadlock its successor. It appears to be Overwatch gameplay mixed with Moba style map layouts.
  But yeah HL:A was indeed amazing.
- Alyx is great. Probably the closest thing to Half Life 3 we're going to get. But even that's four years old now.
- Half life alyx was great, and they are not making a TF2 successor. They are making an overwatch looking game, TF2 will be better still and I will continue to play TF2. (I'm the TF2 fan the comment below said not to let hear you, the only video game I play is TF2)

And one of their employes doesn't have depth perception.

I'm sure that he can perceive the depth that the shaft of that valve is drilling into his eye socket when you turn it. That should count for something.

You legitimately don't need a lot of employees to make a good product or have a successful company.

I genuinely believe a lot of the bloat in modern companies comes from hiring people just to hire them, not because they add any significant value to either the company or customers.

I want to add to this that valve is also very clearly an anomaly in todays business environment. They are not striving for infinite growth but methodical, strategic steady growth.
- That in my mind is how you grow a company, maximising returns for investors is a good idea only for the investors, it deviates the company from the objective which is providing a solution to a problem. It seems to me that Valve despite all the criticism it receives for the high fee on the sales of copies is doing a terrific job on resolving that problem. Also, extending the market to Linux is not a monetary driven decision at all, but it buys back the fidelity of many customers which gain a new feature without any repercussion on stock prices, which are non existent since there aren’t any investors to obey to. The hope is that Gabe will continue on this way and when the problem of passing the baton will present itself, it will be dealt with the future of the company and the industry at large in mind.
They're not beholden to investors, so the company can be exactly as big as Gabe thinks he can manage.
Prior to the mass layoffs of late, companies like Google and Facebook used to hire developers just so their competition could not.
The easiest way for a manager to justify a raise is to increase the headcount under them.

This is like comparing Spotify and Taylor Swift.

I personally think that if valve with their size managed to make a game and maintain their infrastructure for other publishers to use, wtf did the competitor do this whole time?

wtf did the competitor do this whole time?
It's definitely a cultural problem. Companies like EA are completely clueless on the needs or desires of the average gamer. Their idea is to shape those needs and desires how they see fit. It's why they spend so much on advertising and viral marketing rather than making good products.
They hire 1/10th of Valves developer count and spend the entire budget on marketing.
It appears to work really well seeing how people keep buying Ubitrash and EA games no matter how bad the previous one was.
They spend billions to shoot themselves in the foot
Pay their management big bucks aka distribute money to the least qualified.
Anti Commercial-AI license

Well, they don't develop any games. You don't require a lot of people to run a store.

"Their" last game, Counter Strike Global Offensive, is 12 years old, and was developed by a contractor: Hidden Path Entertainment. Ony then Valve took over to maintain it. And anyone familiar with the current situation around the game (CS2) knows how much "development" is going on there.

ok well this is just wrong.
HLA definitely counts, and CS2 IS the current game their working on and making.
HLA was also an extrememly popular game.
- My bad with HLA. But CS2 is a glorified engine update, and is not even near the features CSGO had. In the current state the game is a mess.
  Sure they are working on it. All 3 three developers. Which is exactly my point. It's impossible to compare valve to the other studios, because valve isn't making games anymore. They just happen to own some eternal IPs where the fan base (myself included) eats their shit.
Half Life Alyx is far more recent
- The most polished VR game ever made.
  All the little attention to details, the design, the narrative, everything shows how much they care about that game.

a non game development company not developing games is smaller than a game development company that develops games?

That's weird...

I'm pretty sure my local pub has fewer employees than EA as well I'm just not really sure what the relevance of it is.
- funny, huh?

Alligatoah looking ahh

Who on Earth is surprised by that. Primarily a store front most of their staff will be customer support.

I don't think they have many employees in customer support; I think they outsource almost all of that work.

If they’re looking at employee count then I worry that Valve isn’t going to lose this