this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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How many times has this been posted now? Genuine question: why is this such a big deal?
These are not all video game companies, but for reference:
AMD: 26,000 employees
EA: 14,000
Facebook: 84,000
Netflix: 11,000
Spotify: 9,000
Twitter: 7,500
Hint: none of those companies need all of those employees.
These stats don't include subcontractors and as such they're very misleading. For example, who do you think produces the GPUs inside the steam deck? Hint: it's not Valve.
Why would Valve produce their own GPU’s?
My point being that while valve itself has only 350 employees, it subcontracts far more than that.
Do we include the plumber that unclogs the toilets too?
Yes.
A better argument is who works on Proton compatibility? It's largely not Valve employees, yet that's a unique stack to Valve.
It annoys me too that Valve is getting most of the credit for Proton while most of the work is actually done in winehq, dxvk... I'm sure Valve pays for some development here and there, and greases some developer wheels, but the main thing they do is being a front end for consumers.
I think you're discounting just how much they've invested and continue to invest in Proton/WINE. But they don't do lion's share of the development in-house, they mostly just pay devs to work on it, and yes, manage the FE in Steam. They're still a massive positive force for change in Windows game compatibility on Linux, and we'd be nowhere near where we are today without their investment.
I'm not really sure I am... Do we have some actual numbers into how much money they've sunk in linux?
Gaming on linux is a huge community effort, whether it's wine, dxvk, vkd3d, mesa, linux itself... and plenty of smaller projects like lutris, bottles, UMU... And all this spans literal decades, far before valve ever got involved.
AFAIK no, and we probably never will. But we do have glimpses into it, such as this article saying Valve directly paid >100 devs to work on Linux compat:
I would imagine they still pay outside, open source devs to work on those initiatives, though maybe not as many since they've gotten past the initial push.
They just might, open source financing is good PR. 100 is a fair bit more than i thought, thanks for the source.