Valve Is Not as Giant in Terms of Employees as You Might Think, Court Documents Reveal

Valve is a fixture in all PC gamers' lives thanks to Steam. While it doesn't release games much, the distribution platform alone must require a huge number of workers, right? 

Apparently not, as newfound documents from the Wolfire Games vs. Valve antitrust lawsuit have revealed. According to them, the company had 336 employees in 2021, which is surprisingly few for such a prominent studio.

The data, first noticed by SteamDB's creator Pavel Djundik and reported by The Verge, comes from partially redacted papers but provides enough information to compare Valve to other companies. As PC Gamer noted, Microsoft Gaming has about 20,000 employees, Ubisoft – 19,000, Electronic Arts – 13,000, and Valve comes closer to Larian with its 470 workers, Naughty Dog's 400, and what's left of BioWare after layoffs, so about 300 – an interesting ratio.

Out of these 336 employees, 79 worked on Steam, and 181 were busy in the Games department – interesting considering how rarely Valve releases games, although a lot of those were probably assigned to its hero-based shooter Deadlock.

As The Verge pointed out, back in 2021, Wolfire said Valve "devotes a minuscule percentage of its revenue to maintaining and improving the Steam Store" and assumed it had around 360 employees delivering a per-employee profit of around $15 million a year.

The documents don't reveal this number, but you can see how much it costs to retain Valve's forces. The overall gross pay is presumed to be over $444.5 million.

If you want to see what it's like to work at Valve, check out People Make Games' video containing information from anonymous former employees.

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