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Comment by bluejellybean | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: I currently make my living thanks to valve software

Hah, maybe if you're lucky enough to actually hit a human. Valve has ludicrously terrible support. There have been tons of reports of 1-2 week wait times after submitting a ticket, only to receive an automated response with nothing to do with the actual ticket (even experienced this myself a few times, not fun).

People are quick to praise valve but I don't think it's truly deserved anymore. Sadly the days of them caring about their products and communities are long gone..

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I wish it was only one to two weeks. It took me nine years to get my primary Steam account back after a billing error on Valve's end. Tickets would normally come back with, "It's banned and we won't tell you why." Not VAC banned, just banned from being used.

The days of caring never really existed in the first place.

Something similar happened to my sister's account five years or so ago. I got her a game as a Christmas present, Valve wouldn't let her log into her account, and they never responded to anything. She has a different account now and that one was never recovered.

That's true. In my observation it tends to be that their tracing alerts employees to a problem, which they then proactively fix without the end user having to contact support. When it requires human intervention and isn't caught by their own systems, it's another matter entirely.

I'm pretty sure I was hit by a bug during the recent sales event and submitted a ticket, but to this day never heard back. Their human-based support is Google-level bad.

I dunno, I submitted a ticket a few weeks back for a refund and got a human. I guess his first reply was canned but when I called him out on it, he was helpful and provided me with a full refund. (I had added funds to my Steam wallet to buy an item on the marketplace and then got a 7 day market ban making me unable to use the money. A few mins later the item I wanted to buy had already been sold.)

> Hah, maybe if you're lucky enough to actually hit a human

To be fair, Valve is probably not fit to have proper consumer support since they are still a very small company (with a HUGE customer base). Unless they decide to invest in headcounts to have proper support, that is.

To be fair, last I checked valve is a multi-billion dollar company, not some small-scale startup. They could easily build out a quality support infrastructure but choose not to.

> multi-billion dollar company

checked with what? Valve is not a public company nobody actually knows how MUCH they earn. you can only estimate it.

> not some small-scale startup

They are very small scale in terms of employees numbers. Check your facts.

> They could easily build out a quality support infrastructure but choose not to.

For that statement, I agree with you.

At any reasonable estimate of Valve's revenue and valuation multiples, they're easily a billion dollar company, I'd be surprised if it was as low as only $1B. They have nearly 500 employees listed on LinkedIn[1] which is probably a decent estimate given people who've left but haven't updated their profiles and those without profiles in the first place. That's not a small company by any stretch, and I think we can all agree they're purposefully making the decision to not offer competent support.

[1] - https://www.linkedin.com/company/13922?trk=tyah&trkInfo=clic...

> I'd be surprised if it was as low as only $1B. They have nearly 500 employees

> That's not a small company by any stretch

Please, give me more examples of billion dollars companies which have only 500 employees.

Instagram. Oculus. WhatsApp. SuperCell. GungHo. Mojang. Twitch.tv.

It'd be easy to go on. And I'd bet there's no way Valve is just a $1 billion company.

I don't know about all of them, but do you realize that we are talking about 1B$ ACTUAL revenue in current dollars of sales, not valuation ? These are two very different things.

I'm pretty sure the discussion was about valuation / market cap:

> At any reasonable estimate of Valve's revenue and valuation multiples, they're easily a billion dollar company

They already most likely already have a billion in revenues.

How about valuations based on revenue then...

If they already have one billion in revenues their valuation is likely much higher than that.

Instagram, Oculus, WhatsApp, Twitch.tv don't have a billion dollar revenue.

That was precisely my point.

> They are very small scale in terms of employees numbers. Check your facts.

bluejellybean was clearly not disputing that their current headcount is low. Their point was that a billion-dollar company is not "small-scale," no matter what their headcount is. Check your own facts before you get snippy.

This is no excuse. A company that fails to scale its customer support along with its customer base deserves every ounce of criticism they get.

I'm not saying this is an excuse. They are just not investing any headcount in it. That's a fact.

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