Valve had 71 peoples working in their steam division in 2021. 31 where admin so that leaves 40 people for all their hardware. I’m going to take a wild guess and say maybe 3 to 5 were working on things linux related.

Edit: They had 79 in 2021 for Steam, and 41 for hardware

I’d call that leveraging at that amount of people, for a company that brings in an estimated 6.5 billion a year, and the fact that most of the code was already there.

Edit: They brought in 10 billion in 2021 (covid helped)

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad linux got a boost out of it but there’s no doubt in my mind he would have built a private OS if it could be done with 5 people. It was a bargain for him, it wasn’t a favor.