Steam Is Run By Fewer Than 80 Staff, Lawsuit Docs Reveal

simple@lemm.ee to Games@lemmy.world – 461 points –
Steam Is Run By Fewer Than 80 Staff, Lawsuit Docs Reveal
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There isn't always a publisher. Sometimes the publisher owns them outright, and the devs will only see a salary in either case. There are only a handful of publishers that are worth more than a billion dollars and therefore run by billionaires, and they account for very few game releases in a given year on Steam these days. There's a lot of nuance to this. And quite frankly, if a game I want to play comes from a billionaire's company, I'm going to buy the game, they're going to get some of my money, and I won't feel bad about that.

Billionaires, multimillionaires, they're all part of the problem. Right now you're defending the people making you pay more for stuff than it's worth.

If you sold something for $10 that hundreds of thousands of people wanted enough to buy it, you'd be a multimillionaire too. The only way you fund a development team with a handful of people working there is with multiple millions of dollars.

Oh so Gabe's six yachts, that's for development purposes?

It's irrelevant, is what it is. When you make something a whole bunch of people want to pay money for, you get to buy yourself nice things. I find a yacht to be a pretty wasteful use of money, but when I handed over thousands of dollars for hundreds of Steam games, it's because we were both getting something good out of that transaction.

And you're doing that while your peers are starving.

Do you realize that you're the victim defending their abuser in this relationship? You'll never been one of them, wake the fuck up.

I'm not in an adversarial relationship with the people who sell me video games for fun. Every time you buy a video game from an indie dev on their own web site, that too is money you could have used to buy food for someone who's starving.

When I buy from an indie dev directly the money goes to the person accomplishing the work to make the product I'm buying, not a bunch of rich guys that have so much money they don't know what to do with it.

So what happens when that indie dev sells multiple millions of copies and has more money than they know what to do with? The game is just free for everyone else once it reaches a critical mass? Your definition is so arbitrary. Rich people get rich by selling things people want.