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caffeinade on 21 December 2017
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JEMC said:
caffeinade said:

Well there is at least one Valve employee who appears to want to remove titles.

I don't think it is just as easy as hiring more people.
Valve would need to consider a long term plan, and where those employees fit in, five or so years down the road.
Is it worth hiring, training and housing ten, twenty or thirty new employees if you plan to make them redundant in a year or so.
Is it even ethical to do so.

I am not sure Valve has the capacity for new employees where they are, right now.
I'm pretty sure Valve is in the midst of moving to a newer much larger office, or still settling into the new office space.
Or something like that.

Doing some searching, it looks like they moved late September.

Well, they need to find a way to, if not removing all the sh!t that flood the store right now, at least prevent them to keep coming. Hiring more employees to check the submissions seems like the easiest way to do so.

As for the question of how ethical or not is the temporal hiring of more employees, well, every game developer those that when developing a game, firing them once the project is done, as well as every retail store in the world. It's a practice Valve knows about.

Valve does not strike me as the type of company that strives to bring employees into its main unit temporarily.
I could see them hiring a third party company to fill that kind of a role.

Valve has that per game, gate fee to play around with.
Currently set at 100 USD per game, if increased to 250 USD per title.
The problem could, just, disappear.
All without needing to hire and train employees that don't improve the overall production capacity of Valve.

In my mind Valve are currently in the observation phase of their plan.
Set the cost of entry to the minimum, observe and gather data.
They could then use the data gathered to inform further actions.