this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
731 points (96.3% liked)
Technology
60052 readers
2966 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
that's really silly to argument. only a few manufactures in the world even have the capabilities to produce GPUs and CPUs. even China doesn't have the fabrication capabilities with current generation. So of course, Valve is going to purchase GPUs from a 3rd party unless you expect them to spend tens of billions of dollars to start their own silicon fabrication...but oh wait, now they have to purchase silicon, so they'll start their own silicon mine... but now they need trucks...so they start their own truck manufacture...
Do you expect them to become Samsung?
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.