Some newly revealed court documents offer a glimpse into the financial numbers of Valve, the privately run game developer that also runs the Steam PC game store and sells the popular Steam Deck portable gaming PC products.
The documents were revealed as part of an ongoing lawsuit against Valve by indie game developer Wolfire Games, who has claimed Valve unfairly dominates the PC game industry with how it runs its Steam service. While much of the information in this new court filing has been redacted, SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik posted a link to the info on his X account. Later, the document itself was taken down by the courts, but The Verge made it easy by posting the unredacted financial data from the document in a table.
The information shows that Valve has four employee divisions: Admin, Games, Steam, and Hardware. The financial data and the employee count for each of these divisions cover 2003 to 2021. As of 2021 Valve had 336 total employees. It's likely that the total headcount is currently higher, thanks in part to the successful launch of the Steam Deck in early 2022, which almost certainly caused the Hardware section of Valve to hire more people.
The information shows that just 79 employees at Valve worked on its hugely successful Steam service in 2021. Gross pay was listed as $76,446,633 for Steam team members. For the Games section, Valve hit a peak of 201 employees in 2019, with gross pay of $236,798,782, The Admin section had just 35 employees in 2021 but the gross pay was listed as a massive $157,999,567.
While the gross play employee information is interesting, we still don't have any official data on Valve's revenues and profits, and that's not likely to change anytime soon. However, we do know from Valve's own publicly published handbook for new employees that it claims its profits per employee are "higher than that of Google or Amazon or Microsoft.”
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