Court documents show that not only is Valve a fraction the size of companies like EA or Ubisoft, it’s smaller than a lot of triple-A developers
First noted by SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik and reported by The Verge, documents from an antitrust suit against Valve show that the company consisted of 336 employees in 2021. That’s a fraction of the size of most big game publishers, even as Steam continues to shape PC gaming as a whole.
The documents originate from Wolfire Games’ 2021 lawsuit arguing that Steam constitutes an unfair monopoly on PC digital distribution. The documents remain partially redacted, and were likely meant to have all the juicy details fully blacked out—a surprisingly common error in the US legal system that leads to sensitive data being made public.
The Verge has a full chart of the year-by year number of employees and departmental payroll changes at Valve. The chart confirms prior reporting that the overall headcount at the company has remained pretty stable for the last 10 years—back in 2016 we reported that the company had around 360 employees, while Wikipedia quoted the company as having 330 in 2013.
Here’s the topline from 2021: Of those 336 employees, 79 directly worked on Steam, while a whopping 181 remained in the “Games” department—pretty much the reverse of what I expected, given Steam’s importance to company profits and how rarely Valve releases new games. There were just 41 employees working on hardware development at that time, right on the eve of the Steam Deck’s launch, and the remaining 35 employees were in admin.
Wolfire games actually criticized this limited headcount in its lawsuit, arguing that Valve “devotes a miniscule percentage of its revenue to maintaining and improving the Steam Store.” Last year, a People Make Games report citing interviews with anonymous former Valve employees suggested that Valve’s “flat” corporate structure hurts its employees.
Even with these issues in mind, it’s hard not to be impressed with the company’s sheer pound-for-pound effectiveness, managing one of the core pillars of PC gaming in Steam—whatever its developer-facing issues, there’s a reason most gamers prefer it to other launchers—and revolutionizing handheld PC gaming with the Steam Deck. And whenever the company does get around to releasing a new game (or even just updating an existing one) it’s always an event.
I’ve listed a some publishers and developers of note with their respective headcounts to put Valve’s into perspective:
