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We in the PC gaming-o-sphere tend to view Valve as a behemoth. Its iron-fisted dominance of the space is unquestioned and unchallenged, and even the mightiest of videogame publishers sooner or later come to kiss the ring. But in terms of actual size, it’s not really so: One of the very interesting things we learned in 2024 is that Valve is, relatively speaking, actually pretty small.
Unlike most major players in gaming, Valve is privately owned, so information on the company—headcount, revenues, that sort of thing—is generally not for public consumption. But court documents related to the ongoing antitrust lawsuit filed against Valve by Wolfire Games in 2021 showed that Valve had just 336 employees that year.
That’s bigger than a typical tiny startup, yes, but also a very small fraction of companies like Ubisoft, which reported 18,666 employees at the end of September 2024, Electronic Arts, which had approximately 13,700 people as of March 31, 2024, or Activision Blizzard, which counted approximately 13,000 employees at the end of 2022, in its final year-end report prior to its acquisition by Microsoft. In terms of headcount, Valve is significantly smaller than even Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian Studios, which had 470 employees as of March 2024. (It will always be the quirky little outfit from Ghent to me, though.)
What’s also a bit odd is that of those 336 employees, only 79 were directly working on Steam, even though Steam is, by a country mile, Valve’s big money maker. 181 people were working in Valve’s “Games” department, doing whatever, while 41 were in hardware development and 35 handled administration duties.
Wolfire criticized this breakdown in its lawsuit, saying Valve “devotes a miniscule percentage of its revenue to maintaining and improving the Steam Store.” That criticism presumably isn’t just about Steam store functionality, but also its moderation policies, which have been under fire for years for allowing hate groups and extremist content to flourish.
By another measure, though, Valve is absolutely monstrous. Documents from that same lawsuit also revealed that in terms of how much money it makes per employee, Valve towers over the giants of the tech industry. A Valve employee with a fondness for numbers and time on their hands broke down the company’s internal figures and then compared it with companies including Apple, Facebook, and Netflix. The email chain is redacted so Valve’s per-employee revenue generation isn’t known, but the second-place finisher, Facebook, pulled in roughly $780,400 in annual net income per employee, so we at least know it’s more than that.
Those calculations are based on 2018 numbers and so may be out of date, although Valve hasn’t grown significantly since then and it’s not as though Steam has suddenly stopped raking in money. Valve obviously isn’t earning the revenues of the other companies on the list, but in terms of raw efficiency, that’s huge. And, rather like how the low Steam headcount casts an unflattering light on its moderation problems, that kind of cash-crankin’ might lead one to wonder whether Valve’s 30% cut on Steam sales (with reductions based on sales volume) is in fact behind the times, as Wolfire, Epic Games, and others insist. On the other hand, nothing succeeds like success, and Valve doing so much with so little suggests it has to be doing something right.
2025 could be an interesting year for Valve: After years of slowly grinding through the process, Wolfire’s antitrust lawsuit against Valve was certified as a class action in November, meaning it now encompasses “all persons or entities” who have sold games on Steam since 2017. That same month, US Senator Mark Warner sent a letter to Valve boss Gabe Newell warning of “more intense scrutiny from the federal government” if it doesn’t crack down on extremist content on the platform.
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Kurt Indovina
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