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As a personal and customarily secretive firm, Valve does not supply a lot outdoors visibility into its interior workings. So when years’ value of information on the corporate’s worker and combination payroll numbers leaked lately, we had been wanting to take a deep dive to see what these numbers may inform us in regards to 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 towards 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 court docket docket, The Verge captured the uncooked numbers from a desk labeled “Worker Headcount and Gross Pay Information, 2003-2021.”
Breaking down that knowledge by yr and division with some easy graphs and statistics, seen beneath, provides us outsiders a uncommon partial glimpse into Valve’s group. All instructed, it is a bit onerous 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 secure for years.
Kyle Orland -
The vast majority of Valve’s headcount has remained within the Video games division, at the same time as Valve releases few video games nowadays
Kyle Orland
It is hanging 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 workers, in comparison with properly over 13,000 individuals employed by EA.
The disparity highlights simply how a lot cash Valve brings in with a comparatively small workforce. And a number of that’s because of the chunk of income Valve takes from each sale on Steam. The dominant PC gaming market has seen a large improve within the variety of annual recreation releases since 2012 or so, because of initiatives like Steam Greenlight and Steam Direct.
But, surprisingly, the dimensions of the “Steam” division inside Valve has shrunk in recent times, from a peak of 142 workers in 2015 down to simply 79 in 2021. From the surface, having simply 79 workers retaining observe of greater than 11,000 Steam releases in 2021 is a fairly unimaginable ratio.
Some readers may additionally 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 latest video games has develop into way more occasional. It appears seemingly numerous these Video games division workers 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 gradual rise of Valve’s small {Hardware} division, which began with simply three workers 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 % 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 % of Valve’s small complete headcount. Wanting again, it is spectacular that such a small staff was capable of create a transportable gaming machine that shortly spawned a complete micro-industry of imitators. We will solely hope the {Hardware} staff obtained somewhat extra worker help within the wake of the Steam Deck’s market success.
“We’re comparatively lately a {hardware} firm,” Valve’s Greg Coomer instructed Rock Paper Shotgun in 2021. “And our DNA is basically 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 realize, we have employed a ton of specialists within the {hardware} area who’ve all been slowly educating us, ‘You possibly can’t actually function the identical manner in {hardware} and simply improve issues everytime you really feel prefer it.'”
