Comment by Anon1096
4 days ago
It's evidence of a really immature business. I previously worked at <place bring in a lot of money from people using their site> specifically doing optimizations, and we were well under 1 second to do most things, but we could measure a 10ms improvement in dollar amount revenue gain through A/B testing. With the framework in place to claim dollar credit for microoptimizations we happily had many many engineers working to improve it. The fact that Valve has nothing of the sort after years is embarrassing and untold amounts of money has been left on the table.
I think that Valve's willingness NOT to chase money as you've described is, ironically, a huge factor in their incredible success. That's not to say that shorter loading times are bad, but AFAIK Valve is already among the US companies with the highest revenue per employee - if they are happy and their customers are happy, who is losing out?
Consider that competitor stores were usually more profit-oriented, which was usually also the reason they failed.