We learned just how small Valve really is this year, but also how good it is at raking in the cash: It's making more money per employee than Apple

pcgamer.com:

We in the PC gaming-o-sphere tend to view Valve as a behemoth. Its iron-fisted dominance of the space is unquestioned and unchallenged, and even the mightiest of videogame publishers sooner or later come to kiss the ring. But in terms of actual size, it's not really so: One of the very interesting things we learned in 2024 is that Valve is, relatively speaking, actually pretty small.

Unlike most major players in gaming, Valve is privately owned, so information on the company—headcount, revenues, that sort of thing—is generally not for public consumption. But court documents related to the ongoing antitrust lawsuit filed against Valve by Wolfire Games in 2021 showed that Valve had just 336 employees that year.

That's bigger than a typical tiny startup, yes, but also a very small fraction of companies like Ubisoft, which reported 18,666 employees at the end of September 2024, Electronic Arts, which had approximately 13,700 people as of March 31, 2024, or Activision Blizzard, which counted approximately 13,000 employees at the end of 2022, in its final year-end report prior to its acquisition by Microsoft. In terms of headcount, Valve is significantly smaller than even Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian Studios, which had 470 employees as of March 2024. (It will always be the quirky little outfit from Ghent to me, though.)

What's also a bit odd is that of those 336 employees, only 79 were directly working on Steam, even though Steam is, by a country mile, Valve's big money maker. 181 people were working in Valve's «Games» department, doing whatever, while 41 were in hardware development and 35 handled administration duties.

Wolfire criticized this breakdown in its lawsuit, saying Valve «devotes a miniscule percentage of its revenue to maintaining and improving the Steam Store.» That criticism presumably isn't just about Steam store functionality, but also its moderation policies, which have been under fire for years for allowing hate groups and extremist content to