Here’s how much Valve pays its staff — and how few people it employs

Valve is a notoriously secretive company with a huge influence on the gaming industry, especially since it runs the massive Steam store for PC games. But despite this influence, Valve is not a large organization on par with the thousands of employees at EA or Riot Games: according to leaked data we’ve seen, as of 2021, Valve only employed 336 people.

The data is included as part of a heavily edited document from Wolfire’s Antitrust Lawsuit Against Valve. As shown Written by SteamDB creator Pavel DjundikSome data in the document was visible despite the black edit boxes, including the number of Valve employees, total wages across the company’s various divisions over 18 years, and even some data about gross profit margins that we couldn’t fully disclose.

Employee data starts from 2003, a few years after Valve was founded in 1996. In the same year, Valve launched Steam.It continues through 2021. The data divides Valve employees into four different groups: “Administrator,” “Gaming,” “Steam,” and, starting in 2011, “Hardware.”

If you want to sift through the numbers yourself, I’ve included a full table of the data, organized by year and category, at the end of this story.

One data point I found interesting: Valve peaked its spending on “game” salaries in 2017 at $221 million (the company didn’t release any new games that year, but that spending could have gone to supporting games like Dota 2 And develop new games such as the tool); By 2021, that figure had dropped to $192 million. And there’s another reason: As of 2021, Valve employed just 79 people at Steam, one of the most influential game storefronts on the planet.

“Hardware has been, surprisingly, a relatively small part of the company, with just 41 employees, earning a total payroll of over $17 million in 2021. But I imagine Valve is now hiring more hardware-focused employees after The huge success of Steam DeckIn November 2023, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Grevis said, the edge “He believes that we are now in the transition to an integrated hardware company.”

The small number of employees across the board seems to explain why Valve’s product portfolio is so limited despite its massive business as a de facto PC gaming platform. It had to get help. hardware And Programming He worked with other companies to encourage them to build Steam. Boxes And Control units(The company Looks like great work It might have something to do with it, too.)

Valve’s small staff is also a point of contention for Wolfire. When it filed its lawsuit in 2021, Wolfire alleged that Valve “… allocates a small percentage of its revenue to maintaining and improving the Steam store.” As a private company, Valve is not required to share its employee count or financial data, but Wolfire estimated that Valve has roughly 360 employees (a number likely obtained from Valve itself in 2016) and that the profit per employee amounted to about 15 million dollars annually.

Even if that $15 million figure isn’t quite right, Valve, in General Employee Guide“Our profitability per employee is higher than Google, Amazon or Microsoft,” the company says. A document from Wolfe’s lawsuit reveals Valve employees discuss How much higher is that – although the exact number has been released to Valve employees.

While we haven’t seen any leaked earnings figures from this new headcount and salary data, the numbers give a more detailed picture of how much Valve spends on its employees — which, given Steam’s massive popularity, may still only represent a fraction of the money the company makes.

Valve did not immediately respond to a request for comment. After we reached out, the court removed the document from the docket.

Sean Holster contributed reporting.