They have ~5000 employees.

Most game companies are a tiny fraction of that size. Even most AAA games are made by teams of hundreds. Not teams of thousands.

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filoleg 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Epic Games does way more than just purely making games.

They also have their own Steam competitor (Epic Games Store) and, more importantly, they develop and support Unreal Engine used by tons of other game dev companies.

If you want an apples to apples comparison (i.e., other big live-service game companies) in terms of the employee count, you got:

Mihoyo (Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail) - ~5,000-6,000

Riot Games (League of Legends, Valorant) - 4,500

Roblox - 3,500

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Strom 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What about Valve itself? They have ~350 employees. They make Steam, SteamOS, Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, the Source engine, and run four actively successful live service games: CS2, Dota2, TF2, Deadlock.

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KaiMagnus 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Last I've heard Valve makes use of a lot of contractors however. So the number of people working on their projects is a bit higher than their employee count suggests. Anyone's guess how many though.

I know they're sponsoring a bunch of ARM and Linux projects as well.

	▲	aceazzameen 31 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Every studio uses a surprisingly large amount of contractors including Epic Games, Riot, etc.

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glenstein 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The small size of Valve is simultaneously mind boggling but also not, given its very intentional independence. I would have to imagine that they must contract out or have partners at least for their hardware relationships if not for their massively multiplayer online games. At just 350 people that's enough annual revenue to make everyone there a millionaire several times over. Simultaneously plausible but mind boggling.

	▲	bsimpson 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's well-known that most of the work on SteamOS is done by vendors on behalf of Valve (both individual kernel authors and agencies like Igalia).
	▲	_345 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		They contract out all the time, they've admitted to it in lots of interviews. So I think through the amount of contracting they're able to keep their core hires down.

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Herbstluft 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah but Valve is not publicly traded, so that comparison is of course totally unfair! /s

Having skilled and happy employees that aren't constantly changing and do not spend all of their time on ways to fuck over customers and chase trends is simply impossible. Releasing a piece of hardware and leaving it open for customers to do with what they want? Linux? Not hiring people the second line goes up and then immediately firing them when line stagnates? Preposterous.

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daedrdev 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Epic games store is likely a main culprit as they really have not succeeded while spending tons for free games

Mihoyo literally prints money with predatory gacha

Riot has had several layoffs in recent years

Roblox loses tons of money every year

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cubefox 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The game store doesn't need a lot of employees. A few years ago it was reported that Valve only needed about 70 employees to run Steam while it generated billions of dollars in Steam fees (30% per game). It's basically free money for Valve. I bet the situation is similar for the AppStore and Google Play.

Though Unreal Engine does indeed need quite a few developers. Additionally, using UE is much cheaper (5% on games exceeding 1 milion USD gross revenue) than using Steam (30% on every game). So they not only need more developers than Valve, they also earn less money.

	▲	derektank 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Steam doesn’t really attempt to gatekeep submitted content the same way that Apple or Google do so I would expect those companies to have much larger teams supporting, in mostly non-development roles. Steam support has also historically been kind of a joke (not sure if it’s improved in the last 5 years) though I don’t know if Google/Apple provide a better experience
	▲	mxfh 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You know what contractors are?!

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raincole 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The biggest competitor to Unreal engine, Unity, once had ~8000 employees. And Unity doesn't even make games.

(Not saying this is justified, of course. I think Unity is pretty much doomed.)

	▲	johnnyanmac 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Don't make games, but Unity does operate worldwide and has a LOT of supports for ads (their main money maker, unless something recent happened). That globalization is a big reason many tech companies swell. When you need a team to work in and around every region's laws and regulations, you get big quickly. But also, unity has slimmed down and scaled down on a lot of initiatives.