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Valve would like to disagree with this sentiment ;) Sure valve isn't making GPUs or CPUs, but they did make the steam deck, in addition to the largest online g
by _gabe_ 4y ago
Valve would like to disagree with this sentiment ;)
Sure valve isn't making GPUs or CPUs, but they did make the steam deck, in addition to the largest online game store, and several high quality AAA games, and the valve index. They apparently have around 250 people according to a quick Google search, but that still goes against the mindset that you need 10s of thousands of employees to make a successful large scale tech product (whether that's software or hardware).
- generalizations 4y agoA 250 person organization assembling semi-off-the-shelf components and gluing mostly-preexisting software together is a very different proposition than 20-50 people building a modern CPU from scratch. That's an order of magnitude more complexity than the steam deck, and an order of magnitude fewer people.
- ghaff 4y agoRight. It means there's a lot of things that don't get created--or companies cooperate in some sort of fairly tightly coupled network that doesn't look that different from one big company. (But probably less efficient if you follow Coase.)
- andai 4y agoHow many people designed the CPUs we use? I read a few days ago that due to deadline pressure, a single man did most of the work on (I believe it was) the 8080. But that's obviously a "trivial" design compared to the monsters we have today.
- doubleg72 4y agoOne specific example you agree isn’t even a good comparison does not make a case.