Valve is a famously secretive company with an enormous influence on the gaming industry, particularly because it runs the massive PC gaming storefront Steam. But despite that influence, Valve isn’t a large organization on par with EA or Riot Games’ thousands of employees: according to leaked data we’ve seen, as of 2021, Valve employed just 336 staffers.
The data was included as part of an otherwise heavily redacted document from Wolfire’s antitrust lawsuit against Valve. As spotted by SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik, some data in the document was viewable despite the black redaction boxes, including Valve’s headcount and gross pay across various parts of the company over 18 years, and even some data about its gross margins that we weren’t able to uncover fully.
The employee data starts with 2003, which is a few years after Valve’s 1996 founding and the same year Valve launched Steam, and goes all the way up until 2021. The data breaks Valve employees into four different groups: “Admin,” “Games,” “Steam,” and, starting in 2011, “Hardware.”
If you want to sift through the numbers yourself, I’ve included a full table of the data, sorted by year and category, at the end of this story.
One data point I found interesting: Valve peaked with its “Games” payroll spending in 2017 at $221 million (the company didn’t release any new games that year, but that spending could have gone toward supporting games like Dota 2 and developing new games like Artifact); by 2021, that was down to $192 million. Another: as of 2021, Valve employed just 79 people for Steam, which is one of the most influential gaming storefronts on the planet.
“Hardware,” to my surprise, has been a relatively small part of the company, with just 41 employees paid a gross of more than $17 million in 2021. But I’m guessing Valve now employs more hardware-focused staffers following the runaway success of the Steam Deck. In November 2023, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais told The Verge that he thinks “we’re firmly in the camp of being a full fledged hardware company by now.”
Wolfire alleged Valve “…devotes a miniscule percentage of its revenue to maintaining and improving the Steam Store.”
The small number of staff across the board seemingly explains why Valve’s product list is so limited despite its immense business as basically the de facto PC gaming platform. It’s had to get help on hardware and software and has worked with other companies to have them build Steam boxes and controllers. (The company’s flat structure may have something to do with it, too.)
Valve’s small staff is also something that’s been a sticking point 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 private company, doesn’t have to share its headcount or financials, but Wolfire estimated that Valve had roughly 360 employees (a number likely sourced from Valve itself in 2016) and that per-employee profit was around $15 million per year.
Even if that $15 million number isn’t exactly right, Valve, in its public employee handbook, says that “our profitability per employee is higher than that of Google or Amazon or Microsoft.” A document from the Wolfire lawsuit revealed Valve employees discussing just how much higher — though the specific number for Valve employees is redacted.
While we haven’t seen any leaked profit numbers from this new headcount and payroll data, the figures give a more detailed picture of how much Valve is spending on its staff — which, given the massive popularity of Steam, is probably still just a fraction of the money the company is pulling in.
Valve didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment. After we reached out, the court pulled the document from the docket.
Sean Hollister contributed reporting.
