[3form]

The company is very small, and they're doing a lot with what they have. Steam alone is full of arcane features that I keep discovering. There's a lot of backend stuff. They're making games and hardware.

Perhaps some of this is contracted, similar to the Linux compat and drivers, but it's still impressive to me, compared to the orgs like Spotify, order of magnitude larger with barely any features at all. (I understand there's legal, huge backend, and I didn't see many bugs over time, but still)

[trumpdong]

The company makes $50,000,000 for every employee each year. It can afford more employees.

[zipy124]

But would it actually help. More employees means more communication and overhead. Lean organisations can move much quicker. Part of why valve can do what valve does is how lean it runs.

[trumpdong]

To summarize this conversation:

"Steam is bad because it has few employees."

"Steam can afford more employees."

"Adding more employees would make Steam worse."

Good talk.

[3form]

No doubt they can, maybe they should. My point is that I'm more impressed with the results than many other companies that I know.

[DanielHB]

The number of developers needs to grow log(n) to the number of users to handle all error reports. Valve is way under the log(n) of user.