Valve is a notoriously secretive company that has a huge influence on the gaming industry, particularly because it operates the massive PC gaming storefront Steam. But despite this influence, Valve isn’t a large organization on par with the thousands of employees at EA or Riot Games: as of 2021, Valve employs just 336 people, according to leaked data we’ve seen.
The data is part of a heavily redacted document from Wolffire’s antitrust lawsuit against Valve. As SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik discovered, despite the black cryptic text box, some data in the file is still visible, including the number of employees and total compensation of Valve’s various departments over the past 18 years, and even some gross profit margins that we can’t know Data can be completely revealed.
The employee profiles start in 2003, a few years after Valve was founded in 1996, the same year Valve launched Steam, and continue through 2021. Steam”, and from 2011 “Hardware”.
If you want to sift through the numbers yourself, I’ve included a full table of data, sorted by year and category, at the end of this article. In the file, the titles of the third and fourth columns are fully redacted, but the table title is “Employee Count and Payroll Data 2003-2021”, so I’m assuming the data in these columns represent payroll and headcount, respectively .
I found an interesting data point: Valve’s “game” payroll spending peaked at $221 million in 2017 (the company didn’t release any new games that year, but that spending could have been used to support games like this) Dota 2 and develop new games, e.g. Man-made production); by 2021, this number will drop to $192 million. Another: As of 2021, Valve employed just 79 people for Steam, one of the most influential game storefronts in the world.
To my surprise, “hardware” makes up a relatively small portion of the company, with only 41 employees making more than $17 million in total compensation in 2021. Hardware-focused staff steam deck. Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais said in November 2023 edge He believes that “we are now firmly a mature hardware company.”
Wolfire claimed that Valve “…dedicates a small portion of its revenue to maintaining and improving the Steam store.”
The smaller overall headcount seems to explain why Valve’s product list is so limited, even though its business is essentially a de facto PC gaming platform. It has to get help with hardware and software, and work with other companies to make Steam boxes and controllers. (The company’s flat structure may also have something to do with it.)
Valve’s small headcount is also a sticking point for Wolffire. When Wolffire filed the lawsuit in 2021, it claimed that Valve “…dedicates a small portion of its revenue to maintaining and improving the Steam store.” As a private company, Valve isn’t required to share its headcount or financial status, but Wolffire estimates Valve has about 360 employees (the number likely comes from Valve’s own 2016 figures), with annual profits per employee of about $15 million.
Even if the $15 million figure isn’t quite right, Valve says in its public employee handbook, “We are more profitable per employee than Google, Amazon, or Microsoft.” A document from Wolfire’s lawsuit shows that Valve employees are debating whether to How much higher – although the exact number of Valve employees has been redacted.
While we haven’t seen any leaked profit figures from this new headcount and salary data, the numbers paint a more detailed picture of how much Valve spends on employees – which is likely still just a small amount given the widespread popularity of Steam. Small portion.
Valve did not immediately respond to a request for comment. After being contacted, the court withdrew the document from docket.
Sean Hollister contributed reporting.
Updated July 13: Clarified why two table titles contain “probably”.
