Court documents have revealed detailed employment statistics for Valve, the company behind ubiquitous PC storefront Steam, the Steam Deck handheld, and – still – a team dedicated to game development.
How many people work on the world’s most-used PC game store and launcher? As of 2021, just 79. Valve’s hardware team stood at just 41 people as of the same year, a fraction of its games team which employed 181 people. A further 35 staff were described as being employed in “admin” roles.
Altogether, that’s just 371 people employed by Valve in 2021, for a company believed to bring in around $6.5bn a year. EA, home to FIFA/FC, which also generates around $6.5bn annually, had 13,700 staff on the payroll this year.
So, how much did Valve pay its team of 371 people, back in 2021? We know the figures divided up for each team, too. As laid out by The Verge, Valve’s 79 staff working on Steam were paid a combined $76,446,633 – so, an average of $967k each. Its hardware team was paid a combined $17.7m – an average of $431k each.
Valve’s games team was paid a total of $192m for an average of $1m each. Even better off were its admin staff, who were paid a total of $157m, for an average of $4.5m each. Is this the team that Gabe Newell is in?
How do we know all this? Well, Valve is currently being sued by Humble Bundle’s initial creator Wolfire Games over the company’s 30 percent cut taken from store purchases. (It’s a similar fight to the one Epic Games is having with Apple and Google, albeit over PC rather than mobile.)
Wolfire has argued Steam has an effective monopoly over the PC market, and should end its power to block Steam games being sold for cheaper on rival storefronts – something it says has impacted its ability to do business via Humble. (Full disclosure – Humble is now owned by IGN Entertainment, which also owns this website.)
Back to Valve, and while the numbers above are just averages, and also three years out of date, it’s worth noting that Valve’s own public employee handbook claims the company offers “profitability per employee… higher than that of Google or Amazon or Microsoft”. Valve is yet to comment on the document, which was removed from court records after its contents were first reported.