I just counted; there’s thirteen devs. This team is responsible for:

• The Steam client
• Custom installer work for games that need it
• Billing systems and online payment, and all the internal reporting and auditing
• The store
• The forums
• All the Valve websites, at least as far as keeping the machines online and running
• The Steam servers
• The server-side software, that is, Steam Communities and the server code that talks with the client
• The SteamCommunity.com web servers, plus the middleware that talks to the Steam Servers
• SteamWorks
• The hardware survey, mostly
• The statistics websites, both internal and public-facing
• SteamCloud
• Specifying, buying, installing, and repairing hardware for all those systems
• DRM
• VAC
• Secret projects
• Managing all the content servers around the world

If you’re thinking about the Steam team, that’s the list to think of — plus whatever else I’ve forgotten. There’s a bunch of guys who are kind of on the steam team who do game releases. They include five people total, probably, who get the games, test them, get them into Steam and distributable on the content servers, and then write the news updates and do the artwork for the storefront.

(I guess, somewhere in between, there’s people who lots of Steam stuff but aren’t really counted here. Like handling relationships with credit card companies, or doing support, or working with network providers to locate machines and negotiate bandwidth costs.)

This all comes by way of group chat messages with Valve’s Burton Johnsey (formerly known as tonjohn, SPUF old-timers). [The particular quote above was originally by Mike Blaszczak, however] Burton can only think that other Tom got the numbers wrong — but as the currently 25-strong Steam group proves those numbers can and do fluctuate.

Some other titbits gleaned this evening: the number of staff at Valve is now around 200, and every one of them outside Steam is currently working on Left 4 Dead, and will move on to “more DLC for TF2, DLC for L4D, and EP3 among other things” once it ships.

If the first clutch of Official Game Groups can lead to all this in a few hours, they’re certainly going to be valuable resources in the future!

PC Gamer UK have published some thoughts on where Valve, Maxis and Blizzard are going. Their resident Valve fan-boffin Tom Francis says of Steam:

The amazing thing is that the guys churning out regular additions to these four games are half of Valve. The other half are working on Steam, constantly.

Seventy-five people. There’s certainly enough in the pipeline to occupy them: Steamworks, Steamcloud, matchmaking, minimum requirement checks, ongoing Community improvements, non-game/driver downloads and a P2P network to name merely what we peons know of today.

And yes, P2P is still being worked on. Gabe said recently:

One of the things we’d like to do is to understand what types of applications people have on their PCs. For example, if a whole bunch of people are running Firefox, then make sure that’s one of the applications they can get through Steam.

[Then] there are community features that we want to continue to add. There’s peer-to-peer functionality: the community has this tremendous amount of bandwidth. There’s a whole bunch of content that they’re downloading right now, and being able to replicate that throughout the community using peer-to-peer would be a really good idea. What they need is a structured interface on top of that so they can find the content that everybody’s already downloading. Those are the kind of things we’re looking at.

Other Tom goes on to talk about how he expects Steam to become practically an OS of its own within Windows one day, and it’s getting harder and harder to disagree with him.

Speedball 2 Tournament will be available via Steam at the end of November 2007 and in stores this fall. The retail disc will use the same authentication technology used for Valve’s The Orange Box. Valve’s authentication technology enables Frogster [Interactive, Speedball 2's publishers] to use a single master for multiple languages, to time retail activation worldwide by region, and to control grey marketing and unauthorized activations.

The release is also the first time Valve have explicitly promoted Steam to publishers. This wasn’t done for the big fish like Activision or Take2, so it’s reasonable to conclude that they’re looking to attract smaller outfits now. It would certainly be a sensible move: exclusivity deals like this one are good business that larger companies would never agree to.

The press release also talks about the tournaments, leagues, clans, global leaderboards and matchmaking that are major features for Speedball 2. Hopefully these will be compatible with the Steam Community, but the release doesn’t go out of its way to suggest they will and with less than a month to go until release things don’t look too hopeful. Still, we may be surprised.

• Steam was not compromised, only a regular Valve file server. In fact according to Valve it was a “third-party site” — though what sort of third party stores the sum in their corporate account I don’t know.
• Consumer credit card information has not been stolen. The numbers in danger are all held by cybercafe owners, who have recurring subscriptions to their Steam games and have probably all long been informed (or not?). Consumer data are only stored in enough detail to fight mass fraud, not make purchases, and weren’t compromised anyway. Paying at a cafe does not put your card at risk.

All this will certainly make sure that when consumer subscriptions do arrive (as they will with Pirates of the Burning Sea) they’ll be properly secured, but given that it isn’t really a Steam issue there’s not much more for me to talk about. If you see anyone worrying, send them here!

Update: Valve’s statement, from 1UP:

There has been no security breach of Steam. The alleged hacker gained access to a third-party site that Valve uses to manage the commercial partners in its Cyber Café program. This Cyber Café billing system is not connected to Steam. We are working with law enforcement agencies on this matter, and encourage anyone with more information to e-mail us at catch_a_thief@valvesoftware.com.

Needless to say, modding is quite distinct from retail. Gamers are far more forgiving of delays when there isn’t a set and promised date to anticipate, and even more so when they know that they won’t be expected to pay anything but respects when a release finally comes. It’s no surprise that even when episodic mods like MINERVA and NightFall see delays of the same proportion as Valve’s, frustration may be evident among the fans but outright criticism is rare. Perhaps the generally more industry-aware nature of the mod playing audience is behind the difference in attitude too, but it’s a distinction well worth noting all the same.

The bridge between these retail and mod worlds, blurring the line between the two, is Steam. Garry’s Mod, The Ship, Alien Swarm, Natural Selection, Dystopia and Red Orchestra are all at different stages along the process of moving between the two, and of course there’s the original triplet of Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat and Team Fortress. The list will only grow as more independent developers realise the power of this emerging route to market.

Even if Valve’s efforts toward creating episodic games don’t work out, with Steam and their encouragement of iterative mod development they’ve more than laid the foundation for others to carry on their work. Those modders and independent developers will inevitably create a stable market for the episodically-developed AAA titles that aren’t quite possible today…by which time they will perhaps come out when they ought!

Senior Software Engineer, DRM/Security
Deliver the next generation of digital rights management, anti-piracy and anti-cheat solutions. Help solve some really hard and interesting problems to grow the digital game distribution business and keep the online gaming experience fair and fun for our customers. Numerous bad people all over the world will attack your code, this is your chance to prove you’re smarter than they are.

The DRM elements of Steam haven’t had any interesting developments for some time now. A quick scan-over of the usual places reveals four or five cracked clients running around that allow users to connect to standard Steam servers – but tellingly, not one of them can access servers running VAC. They must be having a great time. Reliable information on VAC itself is proving harder to come by, but going on the contents of the official forums it seems to be doing its job.

The position clearly suggests that the core authentication system is undergoing changes, undoubtedly being upgraded to its Steam 3.0 iteration. As we’ve seen, VAC helps, but the underlying authentication system doesn’t seem (going again on the crackers’ discussions) to have had any major updates for quite some time – VAC being something that merely ‘plugs in’ on top of it. I could always be wrong of course…

Senior Software Engineer, Web Applications

Description
As a senior engineer in charge of web applications and tools, you’ll be part of an extremely motivated and experienced group of people. You will:

• Work as part of Valve’s core development team, adding web applications and components to our best-of-breed computer games and pioneering e-commerce platform.
• Regularly ship a variety of products from small internal tools to large-scale web applications used by millions of people per month.
• Directly and meaningfully impact the experience of those players & customers.

Responsibilities

• Develop an understanding of Valve’s player community and contribute creative web-focused design solutions to improve the experience of using Valve’s products
• Improve internal visibility of various game-related and Steam-related data
• Follow-through from project inception through design to detailed completion
• Iterate on solutions based on internal and external (customer) feedback
• (further bullet points cut)

What could Valve want from a web application when they have Steam? Displaying data to those who don’t use it might be one answer, as could the republishing of data for inclusion in web pages, perhaps for server stats, personal stats (matchmaking?) or even something similar to the Xbox Live GamerCard. It should certainly be interesting to find out.