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A comment on Leaked payroll data show how much Valve pays staff and how few people it employs. Parent comment

Re:Leaked payroll data show how much Valve pays staff and ho... by c-hendricks on Sunday July 14, 2024 @07:31PM (#40964036)
> 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)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Leaked payroll data show how much Valve pays staff and ho... by csande17 on Sunday July 14, 2024 @07:46PM (#40964117)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Leaked payroll data show how much Valve pays staff and ho... by c-hendricks on Sunday July 14, 2024 @08:13PM (#40964265)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Leaked payroll data show how much Valve pays staff and ho... by ilrwbwrkhv on Monday July 15, 2024 @12:06AM (#40965206)
I think the real trick is to not hire twitter engineers.
[ Parent | on HN ]