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Valve runs its massive PC gaming ecosystem with only about 350 employees (arstechnica.com)

submitted 5 months ago by Beaver@lemmy.ca to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] HauntedCupcake@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago (3 children)

No harm meant. I do think Steam is the golden example of a big business done right. All I'm saying is that there's room for improvement.

However do we know their full PNL/balance sheet?

We can make an educated guess. Amazon's S3 charges roughly $0.025 per GB, so an 100GB game would cost $2.50 for Steam to upload to a user. For a $30 game, that's around ~8.5% or just over 3 downloads before it's unprofitable.

Obviously Valve isn't paying consumer level S3 prices, and obviously users can download multiple times. But I would be extremely surprised if they didn't make a rather large margin on each sale

[–] Corigan@lemm.ee 3 points 5 months ago

Total fair always room for improvement, no ones perfect.

Appreciate the good discussion!

[–] uis@lemm.ee 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Assuming there will never be any updates, 3 downloads is what regular gamer can do. First computer, second(friend's) computer and reinstallation on first computer.

[–] HauntedCupcake@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

$0.025 per GB is the most expensive option on S3 I could find rounded up. It would be absolutely insane if Steam were paying those prices when they have their own servers. I also used 100GB game size as a large number, and $30 as a small price tag (for an 100GB game).

I was trying to be charitable with the numbers and it still came out pretty positive

[–] uis@lemm.ee 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

$0.025 per GB is the most expensive option on S3 I could find rounded up.

What is cheapest and at what speed?

I also used 100GB game size as a large number, and $30 as a small price tag (for an 100GB game).

I get it, but then there are all those heavy f2p games like War Thunder, from which Steam doesn't get anything.

[–] HauntedCupcake@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You can look it up yourself, I was just giving a worst case scenario

[–] uis@lemm.ee 1 points 5 months ago

aws.amazon.com doesn't seen to work in Russia

[–] uis@lemm.ee 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Amazon's S3 charges roughly $0.025 per GB

For storage or for download?

[–] HauntedCupcake@lemmy.world 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Download. It's also rounded up. Storage is negligible compared to bandwidth, especially considering Steam's business model

[–] Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 months ago

And their cost is going down over time while their revenues are increasing since they take a % off every sales and sales are increasing and so is the average price of games.