[justanorherhack]

This is not a direct decision of valve. There are lots of people working on games but the company is privately held, democratically vote driven where they don’t fire anyone. I’m pretty sure it’s relatively small staff compared to other modern gaming studios these days.

The gaming industry pc is the largest it’s ever been and growing. Look at subreddit growth for r/pcmasterrace and the popularity and growth of discord as a platform. Pro Pc Esports is also growing, has more watchers every week than the Super Bowl and dominates consoles.

[lmm]

> This is not a direct decision of valve. There are lots of people working on games but the company is privately held, democratically vote driven where they don’t fire anyone.

What do you mean? It may not be an explicit decision by Valve's CEO, but it's evidently a decision that Valve as an organisation has made. (Are they even making games any more?)

> The gaming industry pc is the largest it’s ever been and growing. Look at subreddit growth for r/pcmasterrace and the popularity and growth of discord as a platform. Pro Pc Esports is also growing, has more watchers every week than the Super Bowl and dominates consoles.

I'd like to believe that but we're seeing more and more of the AAA games going console-first or console-exclusive, so even if sales numbers are high that must not be translating into profitability. Indie or indie-style games, like Minecraft or Rimworld, are succeeding on PC, but those are games that don't need maximum graphics performance, so they're not going to be putting money into improving Vulkan or whatever. (Even something like Fortnite is "AAA" in the sense of being a big-studio game with big-money marketing, but it's not pushing cutting-edge graphics performance). Hell, most of these games are using third-party engines, so the only companies that might want to put money into graphics works would be the engine developers - but look at how terrible Unity's financial situation is, even as they're probably powering most PC game sales at this point.

Consoles generally have voice chat built-in, so you can't really talk about discord numbers without having something to compare with. Esports may be growing in some places but it's mostly in console-friendly genres like FPS; even if the pros are playing on PC that doesn't mean the people watching them are. Compare with RTS which used to be the biggest esports genre but is now declining, because it's PC-only (the only sort-of-RTS games that are growing are MOBAs - but those are precisely the ones that work best on consoles).