Valve is a notoriously secretive company with a lot of influence in the gaming industry, especially because it runs Steam, the massive PC game store. But despite that influence, Valve is not a large organization on par with EA or Riot Games, who have thousands of employees. According to leaked data we’ve seen, Valve has just 336 employees as of 2021.
This data was included as part of a heavily redacted document. Wolfire’s Antitrust Lawsuit Against Valve. It’s been found SteamDB creator Pavel DjundikSome of the data in the document was viewable despite the black redaction boxes, including data on Valve’s employee numbers over an 18-year period, total pay for various departments within the company, and even gross profits, which could not be fully revealed.
Employee data begins in 2003, a few years after Valve was founded in 1996. The same year Valve launched Steamand stretches back to 2021. The data categorizes Valve employees into four groups: “Admin,” “Gaming,” “Steam,” and, since 2011, “Hardware.”
If you want to look up the numbers for yourself, we’ve included a full data table at the end of this article, broken down by year and category.
One interesting data point: personnel costs for Valve’s “Gaming” division peaked at $221 million in 2017 (the company didn’t release any new games that year, but that spending could have gone towards supporting games like PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PlayStation 5). Dota 2 and develop new games Artifact); by 2021, that had fallen to $192 million. And as of 2021, Valve employs just 79 people at Steam, one of the most influential game stores on the planet.
Surprisingly, “hardware” is a relatively small part of the company, with 41 employees generating over $17 million in total revenue in 2021. But I suspect Valve may be hiring more staff focused on hardware. Steam Deck a huge successIn November 2023, Valve’s Pierre-Lou Griffeis The Verge He believes “we’ve now established ourselves as a serious hardware company.”
Wolfire claimed that Valve “spends a very small percentage of its revenue on maintaining and improving the Steam store.”
Small staff numbers across the board are likely the reason why Valve’s product list is so limited, despite doing huge business as the de facto PC gaming platform. hardware and software We’ve worked with other companies to build Steam box and controller(The company Flat Structure Maybe that has something to do with it.
Valve’s small employee headcount also poses a challenge for Wolffire. In filing the lawsuit in 2021, Wolffire alleged that Valve “spends a very small percentage of its revenue on maintaining and improving the Steam store.” As a private company, Valve is not required to disclose its employee numbers or financial situation, but Wolffire said Valve has about 360 employees (and possibly 100 employees). Valve itself in 2016) and profits per employee were approximately $15 million per year.
Even if the $15 million figure isn’t accurate, Valve Civil Servant Handbook“Our profitability per employee is higher than that of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft,” according to documents in the Wolffire lawsuit. Valve Employees Discuss It’s unclear how high that figure is, but specific figures for Valve employees are being withheld.
No profit figures were leaked with this new employee and salary data, but the figures provide more detail on how much Valve is spending on staff, which, given Steam’s immense popularity, is likely only a fraction of what the company is making.
Valve did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and after we contacted them, the court expunged the document from the case record.
Shawn Hollister contributed reporting.
