Here’s how much Valve pays its staff — and how few people it employs

Gabe is the smartest guy in business. Guy is rolling in cash, only for himself and those he choose to share it with.

Idk what they teach you in business school, but it's probably wrong.

i took one year of business school, and they teach you to offshore outsource as much as possible and to prioritize your shareholders at all costs. so, nothing surprising.
- It's just the Jack Welch playbook over and over. Even though people finally started to realize Jack was a fucking idiot and ruined GE.
  
  He got rich. But fucked one of the most well known and respected companies in the world doing it.
- Ah, good old American business

336 people

30% grabbed from every game

8.56 billion in revenue

The service they privide to devs and customers is worth it, but valve doesn't even really take 30% anyway. Watch pirate software's video on it.
- I love Steam and I love Gabe, but the system we have that let Steam extract so much money out of the gaming industry is broken.
  
  And that's true for software or online services in general, and I'm saying that as someone who benefit from that system as a software engineer.
8.56 billion in revenue

And that's just estimated from sales on the platform. AFAIK, they have never publicly stated their actual earnings.

Damn, working for Valve pays very well.

What a great company!

Because they don't pay any of their actual workforce: the game devs they steal 30% from for every game sold.
- Tell me you know nothing about the gaming industry without telling me lol
- This thread contains a lot of great bangers. But let's play devil's advocate for just a minute.
  
  Let me know when you build a global distribution platform with 5-9 uptime, credit card processing, full compliance with all of the various laws in all the countries you serve and also provide a cdn for my game for free.
  
  I'll be waiting. You better pull through on this, you owe the community your labor
- You mean the game devs they provide CDN at no additional costs, networking features a dev environment that is far more comfortable than any competitor and various additional revenue streams (such as trading cards and items)?
- You mean the game devs that they take 30% from in a contract the devs agree to in order to list their game on the largest PC gaming store?
  
  Besides that, steam has an incredibly low financial requirement to start selling your games on their platform. $100 usd per game (at least in the US) and you get it back if your game sells enough copies (100 maybe? I forget tbh.) It's a great platform for indie devs which is why we've seen indie PC gaming boom so much in the past decade or so especially.
- "steal" lol.
- If you don't want a publisher to take a cut: self-publish. Every publisher takes a cut. Valve just takes 10% more than everyone else, while also providing more tools and support than anyone else to those devs.
- I prefer not to buy games on steam, and when a game is available from another channel (for example Factorio is available on the devs’ website) I will buy it there. And yet, most games are only on steam, so the devs really don’t seem to care about trying to avoid that 30% cut when they can.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

As spotted by SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik, some data in the document was viewable despite the black redaction boxes, including Valve’s headcount and gross pay across various parts of the company over 18 years, and even some data about its gross margins that we weren’t able to uncover fully.

The data breaks Valve employees into four different groups: “Admin,” “Games,” “Steam,” and, starting in 2011, “Hardware.”

If you want to sift through the numbers yourself, I’ve included a full table of the data, sorted by year and category, at the end of this story.

In November 2023, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais told The Verge that he thinks “we’re firmly in the camp of being a full fledged hardware company by now.”

The small number of staff across the board seemingly explains why Valve’s product list is so limited despite its immense business as basically the de facto PC gaming platform.

While we haven’t seen any leaked profit numbers from this new headcount and payroll data, the figures give a more detailed picture of how much Valve is spending on its staff — which, given the massive popularity of Steam, is probably still just a fraction of the money the company is pulling in.

The original article contains 620 words, the summary contains 201 words. Saved 68%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Im struggling to convince myself if I should read the article and see if some actual numbers were ever mentioned.
- There's an entire table on there.
- Valve employee data, 2003 - 2021 Year Category [Presumably: Gross pay] [Presumably: Number of employees] 2003 Admin $454,142 5 2004 Admin $548,833 8 2005 Admin $11,644,172 9 2006 Admin $7,905,166 11 2007 Admin $1,997,107 12 2008 Admin $19,519,296 14 2009 Admin $20,300,752 18 2010 Admin $34,754,590 19 2011 Admin $35,216,732 22 2012 Admin $68,925,186 24 2013 Admin $48,462,690 20 2014 Admin $90,406,510 23 2015 Admin $91,496,697 24 2016 Admin $95,444,499 35 2017 Admin $83,146,640 38 2018 Admin $103,479,550 39 2019 Admin $109,720,296 39 2020 Admin $118,435,121 39 2021 Admin $157,999,567 35 2003 Games $3,933,064 57 2004 Games $4,471,342 61 2005 Games $18,122,549 81 2006 Games $17,260,260 97 2007 Games $12,768,984 100 2008 Games $39,677,549 136 2009 Games $44,076,164 148 2010 Games $66,201,302 173 2011 Games $68,173,834 175 2012 Games $135,484,323 186 2013 Games $107,654,658 188 2014 Games $152,351,554 185 2015 Games $181,769,451 160 2016 Games $174,660,830 175 2017 Games $221,488,403 184 2018 Games $216,249,204 192 2019 Games $236,798,782 201 2020 Games $199,306,798 189 2021 Games $192,355,985 181 2003 Steam $1,038,091 16 2004 Steam $1,113,136 16 2005 Steam $2,840,825 23 2006 Steam $3,424,485 29 2007 Steam $3,128,634 34 2008 Steam $5,053,283 40 2009 Steam $7,339,922 51 2010 Steam $17,732,609 60 2011 Steam $16,369,045 101 2012 Steam $42,966,257 127 2013 Steam $44,515,505 128 2014 Steam $52,338,579 119 2015 Steam $72,391,837 142 2016 Steam $56,390,975 125 2017 Steam $64,945,395 102 2018 Steam $70,814,165 82 2019 Steam $66,481,253 80 2020 Steam $71,752,682 82 2021 Steam $76,446,633 79 2011 Hardware $2,252,828 7 2012 Hardware $3,460,641 14 2013 Hardware $5,369,203 20 2014 Hardware $10,180,424 27 2015 Hardware $12,396,140 27 2016 Hardware $11,001,217 36 2017 Hardware $16,724,365 39 2018 Hardware $19,578,951 47 2019 Hardware $15,831,572 47 2020 Hardware $12,008,996 31 2021 Hardware $17,706,376 41
- There are no actual numbers. There are gross payroll numbers and number of employees per high level department, but no indication of how that's distributed or if it includes things like benefits. Basically useless info in a vacuum
- "Hardware,” to my surprise, has been a relatively small part of the company, with just 41 employees paid a gross of more than $17 million in 2021
  
  That's the only one I saw that meant anything that useful. They have ~10x that for game development but no indication of number of people there, and 79 people working on Steam.