Valve prefers not to officially disclose the number of its employees. However, during the trial with the Wolfire Games studio, this information and data on employee salary levels became publicly available. It turned out that as of 2021, Valve employed only 336 people.
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Valve has a major influence on the gaming industry as it operates the largest PC game store, Steam. Despite this, the company can hardly be called a large organization, such as EA or Riot Game, which employ thousands of employees. Published data covering the period from 2003 to 2021 confirms this.
Valve employees are divided into four categories in the published documents: “Administrators”, “Games”, “Hardware” and “Steam”. The administrative staff in 2021 included 35 people, 41 people worked on the development of hardware products, another 181 people develop Valve games, and 79 people belong to the Steam division. In 2021, $157,999,567 was spent on administrative staff salaries, hardware developers received $17,706,376, game developers received $192,355,985, and Steam division employees received $76,446,633. That is, on average, per person in these divisions per year $4.5 million, $412 thousand, $731 thousand and $967 thousand, respectively.
Valve is a non-public company, so it is not required to disclose headcount or publish financial reports. Wolfire estimates that Valve has about 360 employees and revenue per person of about $15 million per year. Even if that figure isn’t entirely accurate, Valve has previously stated that “our profitability per employee is higher than Google, Amazon or Microsoft.” Although the court documents do not contain information about the company’s income, given the enormous popularity of Steam, Valve is unlikely to spend a significant portion of the funds received on personnel.