Court documents show that Valve, the owner of Steam game store and the manufacturer Steam Deck consoleshas a small staff and a huge payroll.
The data was released as part of an active lawsuit against Valve by indie game developer Wolfire Games. The plaintiff claims that Valve unfairly dominates the computer gaming industry because of the way the Steam service works. Although much of the information in the case has been withheld, SteamDB creator Pavel Jundik has published link to the data in his X account. The document itself was later deleted, but The Verge subsequently published unedited financial data from a document in a table.
The data shows that Valve has four departments: administration, games, Steam, and hardware. The financial data and number of employees for each of these departments cover the period from 2003 to 2021. As of 2021, Valve had 336 employees. It’s likely that the total number of employees is higher now, partly due to the successful launch of Steam Deck in early 2022, which almost certainly forced Valve’s hardware department to hire more people.
Only 79 Valve employees worked on Steam in 2021. The gross pay of Steam team members was $76,446,633. In the «Games» section, Valve reached a maximum of 201 employees with a gross salary of $236,798,782 in 2019. In 2021, only 35 employees worked in the «Administrator» section, but the gross salary reached a huge $157,999,567.
Although the information on the total number of employees in games is interesting, there is no data on Valve’s revenues and profits. However, the new data confirms the information from Valve’s published guide — in it, the company claims that the profit per employee «is higher than that of Google, Amazon, or Microsoft».
Source: The Verge