Gabe Newell’s company is absolutely lean, and if you look at how much money it makes per employee, it can beat even a giant tech company in that regard!

In PC terms, we think of Valve as a giant, but the opposite is true, although Steam has a huge advantage over its competitors (e.g. Epic Games Store, GOG) in terms of digital stores. Even though we have seen many publishers turn their backs on Steam, over time they have realized that their sales slump was due to this very reason and have returned to the platform (Activision Blizzard, Microsoft, Ubisoft).

Valve is a privately held company. For this reason, the number of employees, the amount of money generated, and information about the company in general are not publicly available. But in 2021, when Wolfire Games sued the Newells over the ongoing antitrust case, we learned that they had 336 employees for three years. That’s a very small number when you consider how big Valve is! Ubisoft had 18,666 employees at the end of September 2024, Electronic Arts had 13,700 at the end of March 2024, and Activision Blizzard had 13,000 at the end of 2022. Even Larian Studios is bigger (they had 470 employees at the end of March).

But we can make this even more complicated. Out of 336 employees, only 79 work directly on Steam! There are 181 people in the games division, 41 in hardware development, and 35 in administration. Wolfire has criticized all of this, saying that only a fraction of Steam’s revenue is dedicated to maintaining and developing the platform (surely that’s why Steam can now record our gameplay, right? we wrote about that earlier).

From another perspective, Valve is huge. If you look at revenue per employee, it’s ahead of Apple ($476160), but behind Facebook (Meta) ($780400). We don’t know the exact amount, but the point is that it’s keeping pace with the big tech companies! These are estimates from 2018, so things could have changed since then, as Steam hasn’t improved significantly either, though they have made money in the meantime.

In November, Wolfire’s revenue was grouped, so it now includes any person or organization that has sold games on Steam since 2017. In addition, U.S. Senator Mark Warner sent a letter to Newell warning of increased scrutiny from the federal government if he does not take action against extremist content on the platform.

Valve’s situation could be interesting for this reason.

Source: PCGamer