It turns out that relatively few people work on Steam

pcgamesinsider.biz:

Despite being one of the biggest pillars of Valve's business, it appears that not a huge number of people work on Steam. 

That's going by documents released as part of Wolfire's ongoing lawsuit against the PC games giant, as reported by The Verge. These were seemingly meant to be redacted but – as spotted by SteamDB founder Pavel Djundik – still actually contained interesting information. 

For example, in 2021, 79 staff at Valve were working on Steam compared to its hardware, game development and 'admin' departments (41, 181 and 35 respectively). Some quick maths shows that that's 23.5 per cent of its total staff. 

Between 2015 and 2021, the number of staff working on Valve has actually nearly halved; back then 142 employees were on the PC platform and store. In 2016, the firm employed 371 members of staff, its highest on record. 

This is perhaps surprising given the amount of money that Steam brings in – and the huge levels of games being released on the platform. 

While some might say it's surprising that Valve has so many game developers on payroll – especially for a company that is famous for not releasing many titles – it is worth noting that the firm runs two of the biggest live-service titles in the world in Dota 2 and Counter-Strike, which will no doubt require a huge number of staff to keep things moving. 

That's on top of its recent push into virtual reality with 2020's Half-Life Alyx, which will have required a massive development team; you can see that when work began on that title in 2017 Valve development staff rose from 175 to 184, before shooting up to around 200 in 2019 as the game came close to release. 

You can also see Valve's increasing interest in hardware; back in 2012, the firm only employed 14 people in this division, but that has risen to 47 at its peak.