Valve employed only 336 people in 2021, but spent over $444 million on gross salaries

Valve is still a private company, so most information about its operations and finances remains undisclosed. But thanks to new court documents, we can now get a glimpse of some of the internal data.

Team Fortress 2

As spotted by SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik, some data in one of the redacted documents from Wolfire’s antitrust lawsuit against Valve was still viewable despite being covered in black boxes (sounds familiar, right?).

Over the weekend, The Verge published a full table containing information about Valve’s gross pay and headcount from 2003 to 2021 (the year Wolfire filed its lawsuit). Here are the key takeaways:

• In 2003, Valve employed only 78 people, 57 of whom were working on games;
• By 2021, the headcount has grown to 336 employees: 35 in the “Admin” group, 181 in “Games,” 79 in “Steam,” and 41 in “Hardware”;
• Most people in the Games division are likely involved in supporting the company’s live titles like Dota 2 and CS:GO (relaunched last year as Counter-Strike 2), while the Hardware team is focused on various devices like Steam Machine and Steam Deck (it will be interesting to see how this division has grown in the last couple of years since the launch of Valve’s portable PC);
• Another impressive thing is that Steam, the largest PC game storefront, typically employs under 100 people (the division’s highest headcount was in 2015 at 142);
• Valve remains a relatively small company by industry standards. With 336 employees as of 2021, it has a smaller headcount than most other major publishers and AAA developers like Naughty Dog (over 400 people), Larian Studios (400+), Paradox Interactive (600+), CD Projekt (1,000+), Epic Games (4,000+) — not to mention large corporations like Microsoft Gaming (20k+), Ubisoft (19k), EA (13k+), and SIE (12k+).
• In 2021, Valve also spent $444.5 million on gross salaries, bringing the average annual pay across the company to $1.32 million (this doesn’t mean that every employee has such a salary);
• Valve has always been proud of its efficiency and salaries, with another court document showing that its net income per employee in 2018 was above $780k per year — higher than Facebook, Apple, Google, and Amazon (you can find more about it in a breakdown by GameDiscoverCo);
• And here’s what the company says in its employee handbook: “Our profitability per employee is higher than that of Google or Amazon or Microsoft, and we believe strongly that the right thing to do in that case is to put a maximum amount of money back into each employee’s pocket.”