Blog

As a private and generally secretive company, Valve doesn’t offer much external visibility into its inner workings. So when years of data on the company’s employee and total salary numbers were recently leaked, we were eager to take a deep dive to see what those numbers could tell us about the performance and growth of a company that has a hand in the -the bulk of Transactions for PC games.

The latest data comes from a poorly redacted document in the antitrust case of Wolfire v. Steam, as first spotted over the weekend by SteamDB’s Pavel Jundik. While the key data in the document is now duly hidden in the court filing, The Verge captured the raw numbers from a spreadsheet titled “Employee Count and Gross Pay Data, 2003-2021.”

Breaking this data down by year and department with some simple graphs and statistics shown below gives us a rare partial view of Valve’s organization. In general, it is a little hard to believe that this pillar of the world of computer games rests on the work of only a few hundred people for many years.

Small but mighty

It’s amazing to consider how small Valve is compared to other big players in the gaming industry. In 2021, Microsoft estimated Valve’s annual revenue at $6.5 billion, roughly on the same scale as EA’s revenue of $7.5 billion in 2024. But Steam achieved those numbers with about 350 employees, compared to over 13 000 people employed by EA.

The disparity highlights how much money Valve makes with a relatively small workforce. And a big part of that is thanks to the portion of revenue that Valve gets from each sale on Steam. The dominant PC gaming market has seen a huge increase in the number of annual game releases since 2012, thanks to initiatives like Steam Greenlight and Steam Direct.

Yet surprisingly, the size of the Steam department at Valve has shrunk in recent years, from a peak of 142 employees in 2015 to just 79 in 2021. Outside, just 79 employees overseeing more than 11,000 Steam releases in 2021 is a pretty incredible ratio.

Some readers may also be surprised to learn that Valve’s Games division has been the majority of the company’s staff since 2003. This remains true (albeit to a lesser extent) even in recent years, as Valve’s production of new games has become much more sporadic. It seems likely that a large portion of the gaming department’s staff is dedicated to Valve’s ultra-popular games such as Dota 2 and Counter-Strike 2which are enjoyed by tens of millions of players and require significant support.

The leaked data also shows the slow growth of Valve’s small hardware division, which started with just three employees in 2011 when the company began work on its ill-fated Steam Machines initiative. Heading into the Valve Index era in late 2010, the hardware department still represented just a few dozen people and a paltry 3 to 4 percent of the company’s annual payroll.

By the time we reach 2021 and the preparations for Steam Deck, the hardware division still only makes up 12 percent of Valve’s small total workforce. In retrospect, it’s impressive that such a small team was able to create a portable gaming device that quickly spawned a micro-industry of imitators. We can only hope that the Hardware team gets a little more staff support after the Steam Deck’s market success.

“We’re a relatively recent hardware company,” Valve’s Greg Coomer told Rock Paper Shotgun in 2021. “And our DNA is really in software, where upgrading things takes as much time as writing code and sending it to the Internet. So the people who work here, we hired a lot of hardware experts who all slowly taught us, ‘You can’t really work the same way with hardware and just upgrade things whenever you want.'”