Valve, a secretive yet powerful player in the gaming industry, wields significant influence, mainly through its massive PC gaming storefront, Steam. Despite its considerable impact, Valve isn't a sprawling organisation like EA or Riot Games, which boasts thousands of employees. According to leaked data, Valve employed only 336 staffers as of 2021.
the wolfire v. valve case had a document published with request for redaction so it has a bunch of black boxes, but some data still remained under it like valves gross margins and commission for 2009-2021, and their employee counts and how much they pay them
— Pavel Djundik (@thexpaw) July 12, 2024
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Employee data from Wolfire's lawsuit
This information surfaced as part of a heavily redacted document from Wolfire's antitrust lawsuit against Valve. SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik noticed that some data in the document remained visible despite the redaction boxes. This included Valve's headcount and gross pay across various departments over 18 years and some information about its gross margins that couldn't be fully uncovered.
The employee data spans from 2003, a few years after Valve's founding in 1996 and the same year Steam was launched, to 2021. The data categorises Valve employees into four groups: “Admin,” “Games,” “Steam,” and, starting in 2011, “Hardware.”
For those interested in the numbers, a complete data table, sorted by year and category, is available at the end of this article. The headings for the third and fourth columns are redacted in the document, but the table is titled “Employee Headcount and Gross Pay Data, 2003-2021.” It is presumed that these columns represent gross pay and the number of employees, respectively.
Critical insights from Valve's data
One notable data point is that Valve's “Games” payroll spending peaked in 2017 at US$221 million. Although the company did not release any new games that year, this spending likely supported ongoing games like Dota 2 and the development of new titles like Artifact. By 2021, this amount had decreased to US$192 million. Also noteworthy is that Valve employed only 79 people for Steam in 2021, despite it being one of the most influential gaming storefronts globally.
Surprisingly, the “Hardware” department is relatively small, with just 41 employees who have paid a gross of over US$17 million in 2021. However, this number is likely higher now following the success of the Steam Deck. In November 2023, Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais told The Verge, “We're firmly in the camp of being a full-fledged hardware company by now.”
The small number of staff across the board explains why Valve's product list is limited despite its substantial business as the de facto PC gaming platform. The company has often needed external help for hardware and software, collaborating with other firms to create Steam boxes and controllers. Valve's flat organisational structure might also contribute to this.
Financial implications and Wolfire's claims
Valve's limited staff has been a point of contention for Wolfire. In its 2021 lawsuit, Wolfire claimed that Valve “devotes a minuscule percentage of its revenue to maintaining and improving the Steam Store.” Valve isn't obligated to disclose its headcount or financials as a private company. However, Wolfire estimated that Valve had around 360 employees (likely based on Valve's own 2016 data) and that the profit per employee was approximately US$15 million per year.
Even if the figure for US$15 million isn't accurate, Valve's public employee handbook asserts that “our profitability per employee is higher than that of Google, Amazon, or Microsoft.” A document from the Wolfire lawsuit showed Valve employees discussing just how much higher, though the exact number was redacted.
While leaked profit numbers from this new headcount and payroll data remain unseen, the figures provide a clearer picture of Valve's staff expenditures. Given Steam's massive popularity, this expenditure is likely a tiny fraction of Valve's overall revenue.
Valve didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. After we reached out, the court removed the document from the docket.
