How much is the profit? 30% is revenue not profit.
Why is money per employee a useful metric? One would expect most costs of a store like steam to be in hardware and network not in labor.
Comment on Here’s how much Valve pays its staff — and how few people it employs
Azzu@lemm.ee 2 months agoIt’s still stealing if the profit is this extremely high. Of course a successful business includes providing a useful product. But if you make so much more money per employee than any other company, that means the amount you’re charging is disproportional. They could change Steam fees to 5% and still be extremely profitable. They choose not to because of greed.
This is not me condemning them by the way, I think their greed and what they do with the money available to them is still mostly better than what other people do, but it’s still greed.
freeman@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Azzu@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Exactly. The question is how much is really necessary to operate that service. We as a species really need to stop thinking about constant growth and more and more wealth, and that includes growth and wealth that is “reasonable” compared to other extremely greedy people. Right now it looks like Steam is growing to infinity and making more and more money. They’re the same like everyone else trying to make more and more money. Of course they’re more ethical and they return value for that money, but they’re still part of the same system of infinite growth that is not sustainable.
This infinite growth is happening because they extract more value than they require. If they extracted as much value as they require to sustain their business, they wouldn’t grow. But of course constant growth is what is what everyone expects and thus no one sees a problem with it.
I see it as stealing.
denshirenji@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It isn’t 30% profit. It’s a 30% charge. Servers, broadband connections, etc… are expensive. Those numbers may be pulled out of someone’s ass, so I don’t know their veracity, but 30% might not be too much.
firadin@lemmy.world 2 months ago
This is a thread about how Valve makes over 8 billion dollars despite basically all their revenue coming from an in-game store that sells other people’s content. Of course its too much.
denshirenji@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Do they bank 8 billion dollars or does 8 billion dollars make its way from our hands to theirs. There is a difference. How much of that 8 billion goes to managing infrastructure.
In fact:
Source: www.statista.com/…/steam-game-sales-revenue/
To be clear, I agree that the way our model works is broken. Wall street and infinite profit gains can only work so long until the system collapses, and Steam is a part of this. Some of the statements made here are just not factual and I feel the need to be pedantic, because I don’t believe that spreading misinformation will help anything. Attack CEO pay disparity or something useful and true.
LunarLoony@lemmy.sdf.org 2 months ago
So am I stealing from my employer because I earn more than the cost of my bills?
Azzu@lemm.ee 2 months ago
If the amount of money massively outweighs your bills, then I would say yes. Also if your “bills” are extreme luxury, then even without that. We really need to stop with this massive wealth inequality. Our economy works on transactions. If the profit margin on any transaction (including labor) is exorbitantly high, then something is going wrong.
WereCat@lemmy.world 2 months ago
lol
Azzu@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Who said anything about costs/bills? I’m talking about excessive wealth extraction. If a group of people gets massively wealthy by taking lots of money from other people, one should think if they really need all that money.
LunarLoony@lemmy.sdf.org 1 month ago
But where do you draw the line? Don’t get me wrong, I am against the idea of, as you say, “excessive wealth extraction”. But what classes as excessive? If I ran an independent shop making cards, and I had an 80% profit margin, is that stealing?
Azzu@lemm.ee 1 month ago
That’s a good question, one that I have not defined for myself perfectly.
I think part of it is the nature of the transaction. When you sell something off your Etsy shop, you create a thing, you sell the thing, you can’t sell the thing again. A shop like Steam continuously takes money from you for the exact same service. Of course it takes money to run the servers and any other running costs, and I’m not saying those shouldn’t be covered. But theoretically, if they have set their automated systems well, Steam runs by itself without intervention from anyone. Whoever owns Steam basically makes money on their sleep. They created it once and it continually makes money for them.
When a game sells well, this game will be downloaded more often, so the relative load/usage of the Steam servers increases. So it is fair to take more money from games that sell better, so tying it to “amount of games sold” makes sense. But does the load on the Steam servers really change if a game is sold for 50€ or 10€? No, what really matters is the size of the game, the amount of updates the developers push and so on. So tying the costs to sale price is also not necessarily fair.
Apart from that, it’s hard to define something as “excessive” without comparing it to other things. As I mentioned once, I don’t think a teacher is doing a less valuable job than a CEO of some big company. Most jobs are benefitting others/society in some way, so I actually value most jobs roughly the same. In conclusion, I would define as “excessive” anything that is a large deviation from mean income, completely arbitrarily I might say if your income is more than double the mean, it would be excessive.