We within the PC gaming-o-sphere are inclined to view Valve as a behemoth. Its iron-fisted dominance of the house is unquestioned and unchallenged, and even the mightiest of videogame publishers eventually come to kiss the ring. But by way of precise measurement, it is probably not so: One of the very attention-grabbing issues we realized in 2024 is that Valve is, comparatively talking, really fairly small.
Unlike most main gamers in gaming, Valve is privately owned, so data on the corporate—headcount, revenues, that kind of factor—is mostly not for public consumption. But courtroom paperwork associated to the continuing antitrust lawsuit filed towards Valve by Wolfire Games in 2021 confirmed that Valve had simply 336 staff that 12 months.
That’s greater than a typical tiny startup, sure, but additionally a really small fraction of firms like Ubisoft, which reported 18,666 staff on the finish of September 2024, Electronic Arts, which had roughly 13,700 individuals as of March 31, 2024, or Activision Blizzard, which counted roughly 13,000 staff on the finish of 2022, in its closing year-end report previous to its acquisition by Microsoft. In phrases of headcount, Valve is considerably smaller than even Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian Studios, which had 470 staff as of March 2024. (It will at all times be the quirky little outfit from Ghent to me, although.)
What’s additionally a bit odd is that of these 336 staff, solely 79 have been straight engaged on Steam, although Steam is, by a rustic mile, Valve’s huge cash maker. 181 individuals have been working in Valve’s “Games” division, doing no matter, whereas 41 have been in {hardware} improvement and 35 dealt with administration duties.
Wolfire criticized this breakdown in its lawsuit, saying Valve “devotes a miniscule proportion of its income to sustaining and enhancing the Steam Store.” That criticism presumably is not nearly Steam retailer performance, but additionally its moderation insurance policies, which have been underneath fireplace for years for permitting hate teams and extremist content material to flourish.
By one other measure, although, Valve is completely monstrous. Documents from that very same lawsuit additionally revealed that by way of how a lot cash it makes per worker, Valve towers over the giants of the tech business. A Valve worker with a keenness for numbers and time on their palms broke down the corporate’s inner figures after which in contrast it with firms together with Apple, Facebook, and Netflix. The e-mail chain is redacted so Valve’s per-employee income era is not identified, however the second-place finisher, Facebook, pulled in roughly $780,400 in annual internet revenue per worker, so we at the least know it is greater than that.
Those calculations are based mostly on 2018 numbers and so could also be outdated, though Valve hasn’t grown considerably since then and it is not as if Steam has all of a sudden stopped raking in cash. Valve clearly is not incomes the revenues of the opposite firms on the listing, however by way of uncooked effectivity, that is large. And, slightly like how the low Steam headcount casts an unflattering mild on its moderation issues, that form of cash-crankin’ may lead one to wonder if Valve’s 30% reduce on Steam gross sales (with reductions based mostly on gross sales quantity) is in reality behind the occasions, as Wolfire, Epic Games, and others insist. On the opposite hand, nothing succeeds like success, and Valve doing a lot with so little suggests it needs to be doing one thing proper.
2025 might be an attention-grabbing 12 months for Valve: After years of slowly grinding by means of the method, Wolfire’s antitrust lawsuit towards Valve was licensed as a category motion in November, that means it now encompasses “all individuals or entities” who’ve offered video games on Steam since 2017. That identical month, US Senator Mark Warner despatched a letter to Valve boss Gabe Newell warning of “extra intense scrutiny from the federal authorities” if it would not crack down on extremist content material on the platform.
