Lawsuit paperwork reveals Valve employs around 350 people – and less than 100 work for Steam
New details of Valve's structure, employment practices, and headcount have emerged as part of an antitrust lawsuit against Steam.
Although paperwork filed as part of Wolfire's lawsuit against Valve had been redacted in parts, SteamDB's Pavel Djundik spotted that some data was still available beneath the boxes, including Valve's employee counts, their pay, and gross margins and commission for the entirety of 2009-2021.
In 2015, Valve's Steam operations employed 142 people, but by 2021, this had shrunk to just 79, even though almost 10,000 games were released on Steam in the same year.
Even with all the staff working across its hardware, Steam, game development, and admin teams merged (41, 79, 181, and 35 employees, respectively), that means Valve employed just 336 people in 2021.
At its peak in 2016, Valve employed just 371 staff members on its books.
Interestingly, most of Valve's payroll is still committed to staff in game development roles and always has been.
With Valve thought to be generating around $6.5bn a year – which is roughly on par with EA's $7.5bn – Ars Technica points out that the latter company employs over 13,000 people.
Interestingly, Valve's gross payroll has remained reasonably flat since 2017, with inflation-adjusted figures intimating it spends around $425m-$450m annually on staff costs.
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