Steam made Valve more than $2,000,000,000 in 2021.
They have infinite money forever.
Gabe Newell runs a biotech company as well.
A couple million on a blue-sky product development pipeline is an incidental cost for the most part.
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I don’t know how you read that from what I said, or how I could have “said this as if” anything. It’s a fact that stands alone.
Do you think that devs and engineers pay for prototypes themselves?
Whatever bud, enjoy being convinced you’re right so hard that you get mad at other people I guess. I guess the end result of the steam machine project or the steam controller or the index or the vive or the steam deck and multiple people at Valve describing that’s how it works are just not real because how they came to exist at all don’t make sense to you.
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it’s frustrating and difficult to talk to you about this issue. I still am confused as to the point that you have. Feel free to continue to attempt to explain it, but I’m not interested in continuing to talk to you. Thank you for your time.
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I was leaving you the option to do so instead of telling you to stop as a courtesy. Considering you would rather not, I will change my approach to hopefully better suit you:
Stop replying to me. I do not want to talk to you.
… What?
It… it goes into the company.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24197477/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-payroll-redacted
They run an absurdly profitable business.
They make approximately $15 million in profit per each of the roughly 360 employees.
That’s after wages.
Nobody knows exactly what an average Valve salary is (they’re a private company, they have no obligation to disclose that), but they almost certainly just continue to accumulate a stupendous amount of money, which they can then throw at any ideas that require all kinds of potential material or licensing or technical costs.
The employees are not making $15 million dollars a year. Probably more like 1/10 to 1/100 of that.
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The steam deck is making them money, that was a product developed by fucking around.
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It seems that you can only think of value in terms of making a profit. But there is also great value in making something to see what is possible, regardless of profit. If you can’t see that, you’ll never make something innovative. The best a mindset like that can ever achieve is only incremental.
This conversation is enlightening to me. See I just always assumed business people understood how engineering works, but were being obtuse to keep us on track or were just looking at the financial spreadsheets. But no it seems some people genuinely don’t understand that sometimes you spend a lot of time on things whether or not it goes anywhere because if you don’t you don’t develop any products or solutions.
Unironically, this is why I no longer work in tech.
Another user pointed out ‘Found the business major’ and while that may or may not be 100% accurate… this person’s mindset is absolutely, hilariously, stereotypically common amongst MBAs.
They know almost nothing about the actual business sector they end up in, they know almost nothing about the nature of any given employee’s actual work, they just view everything through the lense of ‘maximize next quarter profits’…
… It’s all just 100% cocksure narcissistic bravado + 'the way i was taught how to things work is correct, stop arguing with me.’
And these people are almost always your boss, or your boss’s boss.
This person is an idiot and can only think of one possibility. They are ignoring the fact that fucking around on the job can have implications like increasing skills. I made the mistake of replying to this person with an anecdote of mine which I am sure will be deconstructed by them like they were there. Point is, boss allowed us to goof off with pet programming projects and that resulted in me experimenting with code I wouldn’t have had the chance to otherwise and making a breakthrough, which I then realized how to implement for the benefit of said company. So I wasn’t fucking around to make money, but the fucking around gave me the knowledge and skills to them apply that indirectly. But hey this person is determined to infect the thread with their single minded theory that doesn’t make a shit to the actual conversation.
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