Court documents have revealed detailed employment statistics for Valve, the company behind ubiquitous PC storefront Steam, the Steam Deck handheld, and – still – a team dedicated to game development.
How many people work on the world’s most-used PC game store and launcher? As of 2021, just 79. Valve’s hardware team stood at just 41 people as of the same year, a fraction of its games team which employed 181 people. A further 35 staff were described as being employed in “admin” roles.
Altogether, that’s just 371 people employed by Valve in 2021, for a company believed to bring in around $6.5bn a year. EA, home to FIFA/FC, which also generates around $6.5bn annually, had 13,700 staff on the payroll this year.
So, how much did Valve pay its team of 371 people, back in 2021? We know the figures divided up for each team, too. As laid out by The Verge, Valve’s 79 staff working on Steam were paid a combined $76,446,633 – so, an average of $967k each. Its hardware team was paid a combined $17.7m – an average of $431k each.