Pierre-Loup Griffais, one of the designers of the Steam Deck, said that Valve directly transfers money to more than 100 third-party developers of open source software. They help the company with work on the Proton compatibility layer, Mesa and Vulkan drivers, as well as Steam support on Linux devices and chromebooks.
According to Griffe, cooperation with external specialists is “part of Valve’s strategy to coordinate all these products and create a common architecture” so that eventually games can be safely run on Linux.
Griffe also pointed out that Valve’s own Steam Deck team consists of 20-30 people.
Update: initially, we indicated 100 thousand people in the news. This is not the case, we are talking only about 100 developers.