80 world-class engineers sounds like more than enough people. It’s not like Valve struggle to acquire talent and are thus forced to have teams and teams of juniors who are masters at building tech debt.
Valve will likely be hiring and retaining the kinds of engineers who love a good refactor and appreciate the time and space to do that rather than some product manager pressuring for the next shiny shit they wanted yesterday.
And Steam is their money printing machine that keeps them free to do whatever they want. It’s no surprise their team have stayed invested in continuing to build out the best gaming platform of all time.
80 talented, passionate, and healthily paid engineers > 800 junior, sleep deprived, and struggling to buy groceries “coders”.
It’s not about pay the modders so much as if the developer of the game took your mod, put it in the game proper, claimed it was their work, and charged people for it.
I really wish they’d include gameplay in trailers, especially if the game is meant to release this year. I got zero vibe for the actual game from this.
Pretty sure Minecraft was the most profitable game of all time.
And you can be that reductive for pretty much all games. Run right and jump on mushrooms. Watch shapes rotate and fall. Punch cubes. Three of the other most profitable games of all time.