Valve is a notoriously secretive company with enormous influence over the gaming industry, most notably as it runs the massive PC gaming storefront Steam. But despite that influence, Valve isn’t a large organization on the scale of EA or Riot Games’ thousands of employees: according to leaked data we’ve seen, Valve employed just 336 staff as of 2021.
The data was included as part of an otherwise heavily redacted document from Wolfire’s antitrust lawsuit against Valve. As noted by SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik, some data in the document was visible despite the blacked-out boxes, including Valve’s headcount and gross pay across various parts of the company over 18 years, and even some gross margin data that we weren’t able to fully disclose.
The employee data starts in 2003, a few years after Valve was founded in 1996 and the same year Valve launched Steam, and continues through 2021. The data divides Valve employees into four different groups: ‘Admin’, ‘Games’, ‘Steam’, and, as of 2011, ‘Hardware’.
If you want to dig into the numbers yourself, I’ve included a full table of data at the end of this story, sorted by year and category.
One data point I found interesting: Valve peaked at $221 million in its “Games” payroll in 2017 (the company released no new games that year, but that spending could have gone toward supporting games if Dota2 and developing new games such as Artifact); by 2021, that had dropped to $192 million. Another: In 2021, Valve employed just 79 people for Steam, one of the most influential game storefronts in the world.
“Hardware” is, to my surprise, a relatively small part of the company, with just 41 employees making over $17 million in gross wages in 2021. But I suspect Valve is now hiring more hardware-focused employees after the massive success of the Steam Deck. In November 2023, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais told The edge that he believes that “we are now firmly in the camp of full-fledged hardware companies.”
Wolfire claimed that Valve “…spends a tiny percentage of its revenue on maintaining and improving the Steam Store.”
The small staff size across the board seemingly explains why Valve’s product lineup is so limited, despite its massive business as the de facto PC gaming platform. It’s needed help with hardware and software, and has partnered with other companies to build Steam boxes and controllers. (The company’s flat structure may have something to do with it, too.)
Valve’s small workforce is also a sore point for Wolfire. When the company filed a lawsuit in 2021, Wolfire alleged that Valve “…spends a minuscule percentage of its revenues on maintaining and improving the Steam Store.” As a private company, Valve is not required to share its workforce or financial data, but Wolfire estimated that Valve had around 360 employees (a number likely obtained by Valve itself in 2016) and that its profit per employee was around $15 million per year.
While that $15 million figure isn’t quite right, Valve says in its government employee handbook that “our profitability per employee is higher than Google, Amazon, or Microsoft.” A document from Wolfire’s lawsuit revealed that Valve employees discussed how much higher — though the specific number for Valve employees was omitted.
While we haven’t seen any leaked profit figures for this new staff and salary data, the numbers do provide a more detailed look at how much Valve is spending on its employees. Given Steam’s massive popularity, this is still likely a tiny fraction of the money the company brings in.
Valve did not immediately respond to a request for comment. After we reached out, the court removed the document from its file.
Sean Hollister contributed reporting.