Valve is a company famous for its secrecy and its enormous influence on the gaming industry, particularly because it runs the massive PC game store Steam. But despite that influence, Valve isn’t as big an organisation as EA or Riot Games’ thousands of employees: according to the leaked data we’ve seen, in 2021, Valve employed just 336 employees.
The data was included as part of an otherwise heavily redacted document in Wolfire's antitrust lawsuit against Valve. x.com/thexpaw/status/1811727326138310962″>By SteamDB creator Pavel DjundikSome data from the document was visible despite the redacted black boxes, including Valve's staff numbers and gross pay across various parts of the company over 18 years, and even some data about its gross margins that we couldn't fully uncover.
The employee data starts in 2003, a few years after Valve was founded in 1996 and the same year Valve launched Steam, and goes through 2021. The data divides Valve employees into four different groups: “Management,” “Games,” “Steam,” and, starting in 2011, “Hardware.”
If you'd like to examine the numbers yourself, I've included a complete table of the data, sorted by year and category, at the end of this story.
One fact I found interesting: Valve peaked its “Games” payroll spending in 2017 at $221 million (the company didn’t release any new games that year, but that spending could have gone to supporting games like dota 2 and develop new games like Artifact); in 2021, that figure dropped to $192 million. Another fact: in 2021, Valve employed only 79 people for Steam, which is one of the most influential game stores on the planet.
To my surprise, “hardware” has been a relatively small part of the company, with just 41 employees being paid a gross salary of over $17 million in 2021. But I assume Valve now employs more hardware-focused staff following the runaway success of the Steam Deck. In November 2023, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais told The edge who believes that “at this point we are firmly in the camp of being a fully-fledged hardware company.”
Wolfire alleged that Valve “…spends a tiny percentage of its revenue on maintaining and improving the Steam Store.”
The small overall staff apparently explains why Valve's product roster is so limited despite its immense business as a de facto PC gaming platform. It had to enlist help tech-talks/valve-partnership-gaming-hardware-development/”>hardware and software and has worked with other companies to build Steam boxes and controllers. (The company’s flat structure may also have something to do with this.)
Valve's small staff has also been a sticking point for Wolfire. When he filed his lawsuit in 2021, Wolfire alleged that Valve “…devotes a minuscule percentage of its revenue to maintaining and improving the Steam store.” Valve, as a private company, does not have to share its headcount or financials, but Wolfire estimated that Valve had roughly 360 employees (a figure likely gleaned from Valve itself in 2016) and that profit per employee was about $15 million a year.
Even if that $15 million figure isn't exactly correct, Valve, in its public employee handbooksays “our profitability per employee is greater than Google or amazon or Microsoft.” A document in Wolfire’s lawsuit revealed Valve employees discussing exactly how much higher, although the specific number of Valve employees is redacted.
While we haven't seen any leaked profit figures from this new headcount and payroll data, the numbers do give a more detailed picture of how much Valve is spending on its staff, which, given Steam's massive popularity, is likely still just a fraction of the money the company is bringing in.
Valve did not immediately respond to a request for comment. After we contacted them, the court removed the document from the docket.
Sean Hollister contributed reporting.
