How many people work at Valve? Surprisingly little, but the company costs 444 million a year

Valve is one of the video game companies with a huge influence on the gaming industry, mainly due to the highly successful Steam platform, on which it also runs its PC games. Despite its position in the video game market, Valve employs “only” 336 employees as of 2021, which is a tiny number compared to other giants like Riot Games or Ubisoft.

The data on employee numbers and their salaries was part of a heavily redacted document from the Valve vs Wolfire Games lawsuit, which sued the US giant for abusing its dominant market position. As noted by the creator SteamDB Pavel Djundiksome data was shown in the document despite the blackout, including the number of employees and their gross wages over the past 18 years.

From data dating back to 2003 (the launch of the Steam platform), employees are divided into four groups, Admin, Games, Steam, and since 2011, a fourth category, Hardware, has been added. From the table published in the magazine The Verge it is possible to read a lot of interesting information, for example the number of employees in different categories or their gross salary.

From the tables, we learn more about the costs of employees, that is, not directly their salaries. Valve spends about $444 million a year on its 336 employees.

Admin section By: with permission from The Verge	Games section Author: courtesy of The Verge
Steam section Author:courtesy of The Verge	Hardware section Author: courtesy of The Verge

For example, it is interesting to note that wages with $221 million in the Games category peaked in 2017, even though Valve did not release a single game that year. These were likely expenses related to support and work on Valve games such as Counter-Strike or Dota 2.

If we were to stick with 2021, of the total number of employees, 181 people were dedicated to games, 79 to the Steam platform, and only 41 to hardware. With the arrival of the Steam Deck, this number has probably increased, even so it’s no secret that Valve collaborates with other companies on hardware (and by extension software).

The Wolfire Games vs Valve lawsuit showed that Valve devotes only a small portion of its revenue to maintaining and improving its Steam game store. What is interesting, however, is that even with such a low number of employees, Valve remains a very profitable company, estimated at around $15 million per employee per year, which is a larger number than Google, Amazon or Microsoft.