Right here’s how a lot Valve pays its workers — and the way few folks it employs

Valve is a famously secretive firm with an infinite affect on the gaming business, significantly as a result of it runs the large PC gaming storefront Steam. However regardless of that affect, Valve isn’t a big group on par with EA or Riot Video games’ hundreds of staff: in line with leaked information we’ve seen, as of 2021, Valve employed simply 336 staffers.

The information was included as a part of an in any other case closely redacted doc from Wolfire’s antitrust lawsuit in opposition to Valve. As noticed by SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik, some information within the doc was viewable regardless of the black redaction bins, together with Valve’s headcount and gross pay throughout numerous elements of the corporate over 18 years, and even some information about its gross margins that we weren’t capable of uncover totally.

The worker information begins with 2003, which is a couple of years after Valve’s 1996 founding and the identical 12 months Valve launched Steam, and goes all the way in which up till 2021. The information breaks Valve staff into 4 completely different teams: “Admin,” “Games,” “Steam,” and, beginning in 2011, “Hardware.”

If you wish to sift by the numbers your self, I’ve included a full desk of the information, sorted by 12 months and class, on the finish of this story. Within the doc, the headings for the third and fourth columns are totally redacted, however the desk is titled “Employee Headcount and Gross Pay Data, 2003-2021” so I’m presuming the information in these columns characterize gross pay and variety of staff, respectively.

One information level I discovered attention-grabbing: Valve peaked with its “Games” payroll spending in 2017 at $221 million (the corporate didn’t launch any new video games that 12 months, however that spending may have gone towards supporting video games like Dota 2 and creating new video games like Artifact); by 2021, that was all the way down to $192 million. One other: as of 2021, Valve employed simply 79 folks for Steam, which is among the most influential gaming storefronts on the planet.

“Hardware,” to my shock, has been a comparatively small a part of the corporate, with simply 41 staff paid a gross of greater than $17 million in 2021. However I’m guessing Valve now employs extra hardware-focused staffers following the runaway success of the Steam Deck. In November 2023, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais informed The Verge that he thinks “we’re firmly in the camp of being a full fledged hardware company by now.”

The small variety of workers throughout the board seemingly explains why Valve’s product checklist is so restricted regardless of its immense enterprise as principally the de facto PC gaming platform. It’s needed to get assistance on {hardware} and software program and has labored with different corporations to have them construct Steam bins and controllers. (The corporate’s flat construction might have one thing to do with it, too.)

Valve’s small workers can also be one thing that’s been a sticking level for Wolfire. When it filed its lawsuit in 2021, Wolfire alleged that Valve “…devotes a miniscule percentage of its revenue to maintaining and improving the Steam Store.” Valve, as a personal firm, doesn’t should share its headcount or financials, however Wolfire estimated that Valve had roughly 360 staff (a quantity doubtless sourced from Valve itself in 2016) and that per-employee revenue was round $15 million per 12 months.

Even when that $15 million quantity isn’t precisely proper, Valve, in its public worker handbook, says that “our profitability per employee is higher than that of Google or Amazon or Microsoft.” A doc from the Wolfire lawsuit revealed Valve staff discussing simply how a lot increased — although the particular quantity for Valve staff is redacted.

Whereas we haven’t seen any leaked revenue numbers from this new headcount and payroll information, the figures give a extra detailed image of how a lot Valve is spending on its workers — which, given the large recognition of Steam, might be nonetheless only a fraction of the cash the corporate is pulling in.

Valve didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark. After we reached out, the court docket pulled the doc from the docket.

Sean Hollister contributed reporting. 

Replace, July thirteenth: Clarified why two desk headings embrace “presumably.”