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Valve is a company known for its secrecy and considerable influence over the video game industry, particularly because it runs the massive Steam PC game store. But despite that influence, Valve isn’t a large organization comparable to the thousands of employees at EA or Riot Games: according to the leaked data we’ve seen, in 2021, Valve employed just 336 people.
The data was included as part of an otherwise heavily redacted document from Wolfire’s antitrust lawsuit against Valve. by Pavel Djundik, creator of SteamDBSome data in the document was visible despite the black boxes, including Valve’s headcount and gross compensation across different parts of the company over 18 years, and even some data on 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: “Admin,” “Games,” “Steam,” and, starting in 2011, “Hardware.”
If you want to dig through the numbers yourself, I’ve included a full table of the data, sorted by year and category, at the end of this post.
One data point I found interesting: Valve peaked with its “Games” salary 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 number had dropped to $192 million. Another: In 2021, Valve employed just 79 people for Steam, which is one of the most influential game stores on the planet.
“Hardware,” to my surprise, was a relatively small part of the company, with just 41 employees paid over $17 million gross in 2021. But I suspect Valve is now employing more hardware staff after the runaway success of the Steam Deck. In November 2023, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais said: The edge that he believes that “we are now firmly in the camp of a full-fledged hardware company.”
Wolfire claimed that Valve “…spends a minuscule percentage of its revenue on maintaining and improving the Steam Store.”
The small number of employees overall is apparently why Valve’s product list is so limited despite its huge business as the de facto PC gaming platform. It had to get help on material and software and worked with other companies to have them build Steam cases and controllers. (The company’s flat structure may also have something to do with it.)
Valve’s small staff is also a sticking point for Wolfire. When he filed his complaint in 2021, Wolfire alleged that Valve “…spends a minuscule percentage of its revenue on maintaining and improving the Steam Store.” Valve, as a private company, is not required to share its workforce or finances, but Wolfire estimated that Valve had about 360 employees (a number likely drawn from Valve itself in 2016) and that the profit per employee was about $15 million per year.
While that $15 million figure isn’t entirely accurate, Valve, in its public sector employee manualclaims that “our profitability per employee is higher than that of Google, Amazon or Microsoft.” A Wolfire lawsuit document revealed Valve Employees Discuss how much higher it is – although the precise number for Valve employees is censored.
While we haven’t seen any leaked profit figures from this new headcount and salary data, the numbers do provide a more detailed picture of what Valve is spending on its staff – which, given Steam’s massive popularity, is likely still only a fraction of the money the company makes.
Valve did not immediately respond to a request for comment. After we reached out, the court removed the document from the docket.
Sean Hollister contributed reporting.