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As a personal and usually secretive firm, Valve does not provide a lot outdoors visibility into its interior workings. So when years’ value of knowledge on the corporate’s worker and mixture payroll numbers leaked just lately, we have been desperate to take a deep dive to see what these numbers might inform us concerning the operation and evolution of an organization that has a hand within the majority of PC gaming transactions.
The latest knowledge comes from a poorly redacted doc in Wolfire’s antitrust lawsuit in opposition to Steam, as first observed over the weekend by SteamDB’s Pavel Djundik. Whereas the important thing knowledge within the doc has now been correctly hidden within the courtroom docket, The Verge captured the uncooked numbers from a desk labeled “Worker Headcount and Gross Pay Information, 2003-2021.”
Breaking down that knowledge by 12 months and division with some easy graphs and statistics, seen beneath, provides us outsiders a uncommon partial glimpse into Valve’s group. All advised, it is a bit arduous to consider that this lynchpin of the PC gaming world has rested on the work of only a few hundred individuals for a few years now.
Small however mighty
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Valve’s complete worker rely has been remarkably steady for years.
Kyle Orland -
Nearly all of Valve’s headcount has remained within the Video games division, whilst Valve releases few video games as of late
Kyle Orland
It is putting to think about simply how small Valve is in comparison with different main gamers within the recreation {industry}. In 2021, Microsoft estimated Valve’s annual income at $6.5 billion, roughly on the identical scale as EA’s $7.5 billion in 2024 income. However Steam achieved these numbers with round 350 staff, in comparison with effectively over 13,000 individuals employed by EA.
The disparity highlights simply how a lot cash Valve brings in with a comparatively small workforce. And lots of that’s because of the chunk of income Valve takes from each sale on Steam. The dominant PC gaming market has seen an enormous enhance within the variety of annual recreation releases since 2012 or so, because of initiatives like Steam Greenlight and Steam Direct.
But, surprisingly, the scale of the “Steam” division inside Valve has shrunk lately, from a peak of 142 staff in 2015 down to only 79 in 2021. From the skin, having simply 79 staff retaining monitor of greater than 11,000 Steam releases in 2021 is a fairly unbelievable ratio.
Some readers can also be stunned that Valve’s “Video games” division has represented a majority of the corporate’s headcount since 2003. That has remained true (although to a lesser extent) even in more moderen years, as Valve’s output of recent video games has turn out to be far more occasional. It appears probably numerous these Video games division staff are dedicated to ultra-popular Valve video games like Dota 2 and Counter-Strike 2, which get pleasure from tens of tens of millions of gamers and want important help work.
Sam Machkovech
The leaked knowledge additionally reveals the sluggish rise of Valve’s small {Hardware} division, which began with simply three staff in 2011 as the corporate started work on its doomed Steam Machines initiative. Transitioning into the Valve Index period within the late 2010s, the {hardware} division nonetheless represented only a few dozen individuals and a paltry 3 to 4 p.c of the corporate’s annual payroll.
By the point we hit 2021 and the run-up to the Steam Deck, the {Hardware} division nonetheless makes up simply 12 p.c of Valve’s small complete headcount. Wanting again, it is spectacular that such a small workforce was in a position to create a transportable gaming gadget that rapidly spawned a complete micro-industry of imitators. We will solely hope the {Hardware} workforce received somewhat extra worker help within the wake of the Steam Deck’s market success.
“We’re comparatively just lately a {hardware} firm,” Valve’s Greg Coomer advised Rock Paper Shotgun in 2021. “And our DNA is actually in software program the place upgrading stuff, it takes so long as writing some code and transport it on the web. So the individuals who work right here, you recognize, we have employed a ton of specialists within the {hardware} area who’ve all been slowly educating us, ‘You’ll be able to’t actually function the identical means in {hardware} and simply improve issues everytime you really feel prefer it.'”
