Don’t need that many employees to run a store, programmers/IT and marketing and you’re good to go. Employees wouldn’t count contractors either so they probably have a lot more “employees” than that.

Not only that, Valve has done a TON of work to outsource as much of the process of running Steam off to the users and developers. Self-publishing, a minimum of moderation, automated greenlight processes, automated ratings, database tags, controller configs...

Their entire business model is to make money with as little effort as possible. I've been saying for ages that people vastly underestimate how ruthlessly profitable their business is. We didn't have the numbers, but we roughly knew this is what was going on.

Gabe owns six yachts, people should always keep that in mind when praising him, he’s not the friend of the average Joe, he just realized there’s profit to be made by not pissing people off, but he’s still making enough profit from us to be a billionaire while the majority of people live paycheck to paycheck.

Holy shit Gabe Newell is a billionaire (it’s just at the second paragraph). This does change my view of him and steam. So uncool.

What did you expect? He owns Valve who has the place to buy video games on PC with Steam.
But you’ll be hard pressed to find a store front that is not owned by a billionaire or some publicly traded corporation.