How is Steam profitable?

[tarheel91]

shio said:

tarheel91 said:
Err, correct my if I'm wrong, but don't most Steam games have dedicated servers run by users? If that's the case, they shouldn't have to deal with too much server upkeep beyond download/cloud servers, right?

Steam owns over 150 Thousand Servers...

I recognize it's still a ridiculous number of servers.  However, the OP made it seem like the servers were used for gameplay itself.  This is not true, from what I understand.