Valve apparently spent $190 million on its gaming division in 2021. According to media reports, this is evident from at least one unpublished court document that has since been taken down. Accordingly, Valve had only 336 employees in 2021.
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American technology magazine The Verge has collected figures that show salary expenses and the number of employees from the document into a spreadsheet. They should be treated with caution for several reasons: It is not clear where the information actually comes from. The court document comes from a court dispute between Valve and Wolffire Games, in which the Steam developer was accused of monopolistic practices. What is not known, however, is whether the numbers are Valve’s information or Wolffire’s estimates – and how good these estimates will actually be.
It is difficult to calculate the salaries of individual people because individual work areas may also include senior staff. In the “Administration” area, which is likely to describe administration here, US$186 million was distributed among 35 employees in 2021 – but the range of individual salaries is likely to vary widely. The figures presented are also likely to reflect company costs, which are usually much higher than actual salaries.
Most employees play games
The numbers, to the extent they are accurate, are more meaningful for Valve’s organizational structure. These are divided into four categories: Admin, Games, Steam, and Hardware. According to the latest data, the Games department had the most employees in 2021 with 181 employees.
In contrast, only 79 employees worked in the “Steam” work area. The gaming platform is the most important source of income for the American company, which keeps a commission of up to 30 percent for content sold on Steam. According to the document, the hardware department was significantly smaller with 41 employees in 2021. Above all, the number of hardware employees declined slightly – there were 47 employees in 2019. At that time, Valve launched the Index VR headset. The development of the Steam Deck should also fall into the hardware department.
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Overall, by the numbers, at least in 2021, Valve was a surprisingly small company with fewer employees than many development studios. The Belgian Larian studio has about 470 employees, Epic Games has over 4,000 employees.
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