I've been joking that Steam on macOS is so bad that there must be no one at Valve who has used it because there's no way you ship such brazenly slow software knowingly, but with 79 people this is actually probably true.

Apple screwing you over twice will do that to your products targeting Apple users.

How did Apple screw them over twice?

I've never seen these companies (that are supposedly everywhere) that have all this "deadweight". Every company I've worked at has had 4X to 10X more work than enough staff to do the work. We beg for headcount to hire more so we can actually do what we set out to do, but we never have enough. I guess these places exist, but I've never really seen it myself.

Clearly you haven't worked in any particularly big companies. The whole ship is deadweight.

> steam is big, but it's not a product so complex you'd need over 100 people to maintain it

I dunno, I think Steam is pretty complex:

- The steam store (credit card processing, optimizing search, review bombs, gift buying, features around various ways to hide games you've purchased, marketplace)

- Workshop (Uploading, managing people's subscriptions, SDKs)

- Cloud Saves

- Remote Play, works remotely without any port mapping (so they're running a service for that) (clients for macOS, Windows, iOS/iPadOS/tvOS, Android)

- Controller Mapping (DualShock 4, Dual Sense, various Nintendo Controllers, Xbox controllers, pretty intense UI)

- New Video Recording with SDK for games to integrate with

- Friends / Chat

- Broadcasting games

- The client itself, for Windows, macOS, Linux)

And a whole lot more (forums, profile customization, guides)

According to the article, Valve is in fact currently maintaining all those features with a team of ~80 people. So this is a good opportunity to improve your understanding of the number of people it takes to maintain software.

One thing Valve seems to understand better than most big tech companies is that once a product/feature is done, you don't need the same size team to maintain it. A lot of parts of Steam have been functionally unchanged for the last few years and just... keep working. The people who worked on Cloud Saves have presumably moved on to something else, instead of entering a Google-esque cycle of pointless Cloud Saves feature launches and deprecations.

Oh, at my day job we are about 5 engineers maintaining and adding features to support thousands of users, I'm aware of how few people are actually needed to maintain and build software.

My objection was to the phrase "Steam is not complex", which I guess wasn't the posters point.

I think the real trick is to not hire twitter engineers.

Valve tried to avoid the biggest cause of bloat, hierarchys and silo chieftains.

Compare it to Uber, which employs 30k people and they "just" mediate transport contracts and still thousands of those are engineers. Or Airbnb which is 5k+ employees I believe.

Steam is another data point that convinces me that public ownership of companies leads to quick and ruthless enshitification and that growth is only a good metric in specific contexts.

30k is insane.