Here’s how much Valve pays its staff — and how few people it employs
Valve is a famously secretive company with an enormous influence on the gaming industry, particularly because it runs the massive PC gaming storefront Steam. But despite that influence, Valve isn’t a large organization on par with EA or Riot Games’ thousands of employees: according to leaked data we’ve seen, as of 2021, Valve employed just 336 staffers.
The data was included as part of an otherwise heavily redacted document from Wolfire’s antitrust lawsuit against Valve. 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...