Games

I think you're misunderstanding what sorts of roles a brand, sales, PR and community management teams actually have, beyond... I'm guessing you're thinking traditional advertising stuff. But also what sort of role they would have under Valve's extremely opaque strategy.

At the absolute least Valve has a ton of third party relations to handle, which I know for a fact they do because I've physically seen the people doing it. So there's that.

They also run one of the biggest esports organizations in the business, or at least they manage it, which is effectively its own standalone thing on the side. They fully run The International, as far as I can tell, and they at the very least fund and organize the CS majors circuit.

They run one of the world's biggest digital service platforms, with an absolutely insane amount of third parties involved worldwide. They have comarketing deals all over the place. Every time you see a game show up on a Steam banner somebody had to have a conversation about that, sign deals, source art, get it cleared... it's a whole mess.

They run everry bit of branding, marketing and community management on Steam. Every sale, every ad, every bit of written copy you see on Steam that is not uploaded directly by a game maker? Somebody made those.

They ship and sell games and hardware. All those Steam Deck OLED reviews and previews you saw? Somebody went and set those up, signed NDAs and embargos, shipped test units, provided review guides, handled questions from the press, got the right info to the right places.

Every campaign, loot box, piece of cosmetics, seasonal event in CS2 or DOTA 2 or any other Valve game? Somebody put those together. Not just the content, the in-store materials, copy, go-to-market plan, the whole deal.

Valve are intentionally obtuse about what they do. They don't put roles next to names on credits. They don't put in credits at all, sometimes. They don't advertise job positions or share what the jobs actually are. They don't easily provide points of contact or names or have roles or tell anybody what they do or how, with very few exceptions. Because it helps their image. It helps sell that one of the biggest online marketplaces in the world (we're talking Netflix big. Amazon big) is somehow an upstart of engineers coming up with ideas on the spot. And that is what we call "a carefully cultivated image".

I absolutely believe that they run lean and flexible. I have no question. But I'd be less suprised to find out that Valve has no cleaning staff than to find they have nobody working on brand, comms or event organization.