Valve is a private and generally secretive company, with little outside insight into its inner workings. But years of data on the company’s employees and aggregated payroll have been leaked, giving everyone a glimpse into the workings and progress of a company that deals in PC gaming transactions. mostly affected.
A recent data they come from a poorly redacted document in Wolfire’s antitrust lawsuit against Steam. The numbers are from the table labeled “Employee Headcount and Gross Pay Data, 2003-2021” are derived from, but key details in the document have now been removed from the court docket. Breaking down the data into years and divisions with a few simple graphs and statistics gives us outsiders a rare partial glimpse into Valve’s organization. All in all, it’s a little hard to believe that the backbone of the PC gaming world has been the work of just a few hundred people for years.
It’s shocking how small Valve is compared to other big players in the gaming industry. In 2021, Microsoft expects Valve’s annual revenue to be $6.5 billion appreciatedwhich is about the same magnitude as EA 2024 7.5 billion dollars income. But Steam achieved those numbers with around 350 employees, compared to EA’s well over With its 13,000 employees. The difference highlights how much money Valve makes with a relatively small workforce. And a big part of that is because Valve gets a cut of every Steam sale. The PC gaming market has seen a huge increase in the number of games released each year since 2012, thanks to initiatives such as Steam Greenlight and Steam Direct.
Yet surprisingly, the size of the “Steam” division within Valve has shrunk in recent years, from a peak of 142 in 2015 to just 79 by 2021. From the outside looking in, just 79 employees tending over 11,000 Steam releases in 2021 is a pretty incredible ratio. Some readers may be surprised by the fact that since 2003, the majority of the company’s workforce has been in the “Games” department. This has remained true even in recent years (albeit to a lesser extent), as Valve releases new games much more became casual. It seems likely that most of the Games division’s employees work on Valve’s hugely popular games like Dota 2 and Counter-Strike 2, which have tens of millions of players and require significant support work.
The leaked data also shows the slow rise of Valve’s humble Hardware division, which started with just three employees in 2011 when the company began working on the failed Steam Machines initiative. In the transition to the Valve Index era in the late 2010s, the hardware division still only comprised a few dozen people and a paltry 3-4 percent of the company’s annual payroll. By the time we get to 2021 and the preparation of the Steam Deck, the hardware department is still only 12 percent of Valve’s workforce. In retrospect, it’s impressive that such a small team was able to create a portable gaming device that quickly spawned an entire micro-industry of imitators. We can only hope that the success of the Steam Deck has given the Hardware team a bit more staff.
“Relatively recently, we were a hardware company” – He told Valve’s Greg Coomer for Rock Paper Shotgun in 2021. “But our DNA is really in software, where updating things is writing some code and sending it out over the Internet. The people working here – you know, we hired a lot of experts in the hardware area – slowly taught us that ‘You can’t really work in the same way in hardware and just update things whenever you feel like it’.
Divisional breakdowns aside, it’s easy to pick out a few distinguishable eras in Valve’s recent employment history. The first is its fairly consistent growth: Valve started in 2003 with just 78 employees, and then the total number of employees continued to grow, reaching 351 in 2012. This period coincided with Steam becoming the primary way for PC gamers to access new titles, and included the relatively quick death of retail sales of boxed PC games. After 2012, Valve’s total employee count remained remarkably stable, fluctuating between 325 and 375 employees by 2021.
However, total expenditures on gross wages for all employees continued to rise even with the total number of employees unchanged: from approximately $300 million in 2011 to nearly $450 million by 2021. Thus, the average gross earnings per employee at Valve rose from $483,000 in 2011 to $1.32 million in 2021. That may seem high, but it seems downright conservative for a company that generates about the same revenue as a major game publisher with about 38 times as many employees. However, this general salary average masks huge variations in average gross salaries by department. Of the four listed divisions, the handful of hardware employees had by far the lowest average salary at almost $500,000 a year. However, the 35 administrative staff are at the other end of the wage spectrum, earning an average gross salary of $4.5 million per employee in 2021.
It wasn’t always like that. Back in 2004, the average salary for an Admin employee was only 95 percent of the average salary for a non-Admin employee. It’s a testament to the company’s much-vaunted “flat” organizational structure that Valve designed for new hires manual sums it up as “we have no management and no one reports to anyone else. We do have a founder/president, but even he is not your manager”. But if the members of the Admin department don’t even act like “managers” overall, they are definitely paid as if they were. Since 2005, the average salary rate for the Admin department has generally ranged from 250 to 550 percent of the average salary for non-admin departments, reaching 474 percent in 2021. Overall, in 2021, Admin accounted for only 10 percent of all Valve employees, but reached 36 percent of total gross labor costs.
Of course, it is difficult to extract too many details from these average numbers. All we know is that the average salary of the 35-employee Admin department can be skewed by the eight- or nine-figure salaries of even a handful of executives. And the wage disparities seen here seem downright strange when CEO Bobby Kotick in 2020 1560 times as much earned than the average Activision employee. Still, the existence of a well-paid “Admin” class at Valve at least raises questions about the lack of hierarchy that the company lauds.
All in all, this little insight into Valve’s structure only gives a distorted, partial, and somewhat outdated picture of the employee structure that helps run the world’s largest PC gaming platform. But this humble insight is probably the most we’ll know about this privately held company for the foreseeable future.
Source: sg.hu
