From what I understand, they basically have a very open work structure. People are free to work on what they want, when they want. They actually are against high workloads and do everything they can to prevent employee burnout.

Source

I can't say if that extends beyond the development teams to other departments like server management, but everything I've ever seen about them says they're all just in it to have fun, make cool shit now and then, and of course make tons of money. The fact that their sales platform basically just prints money helps support that culture, obviously.

your explanation brought to mind the design ideals behind the RISC (reduced instruction set computer) CPU architecture. Less complexity means higher throughput.

Hope its not a shitty simile lol

This is such a simple idea that people seem incapable of understanding

Big companies can't innovate. They're pulled in too many directions and create bureaucracies that stifle the individuality needed to push beyond known techniques. At best, they can iterate and imitate - and even that is very hit or miss

There's this idea companies must grow or die - but in reality, companies grow until they can only perpetuate themselves. They start to only make sense on paper

Individuals drive progress - they need time and autonomy

Your point about agility is valid but Valve hasn’t veered and pivoted their way to success. Their core model and service have stayed pretty consistent for many years now. And while a cruise ship can’t steer quickly, it can move a hell of a lot more people much faster than a canoe. They are just getting a lot done with very few people and it’s 100% worth of remark. I’d love to hear more about how they do it.

Twitter runs a single web application.

They also do make games.

They don’t make games

DOTA and CS beg to differ. Spotify is a "storefront" that produces nothing but has about 25x more employees.

Wall Street would probably say 15-30,000+. I think the point of the surprise is that actually it’s possible to be massively profitable and have good products without needing massive teams of people. How many mediocre/bad AAA games have teams larger than Valve’s entire staff? More isn’t always better, sometimes it’s just more.

I haven’t read this article, because yeah, I’ve seen this same basic headline over a dozen times in the past week on Lemmy, but I think it’s a testament to what can happen when a private company doesn’t have a lot of shareholders and is run by people who just want the company to run well and be profitable. They don’t have to chase some unsustainable Wall Street expectation of x% growth every quarter.

All that says is that if you give people choice, they might chose not to make games in today’s market, that’s not bad imo. It’s possible that building new games isn’t what the world needs right now.

IDK, Spotify is somewhat comparable... they both distribute digital media.

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.

Yeah, netflix is though