Leaked payroll data show how much Valve pays staff and how few people it employs
Valve, known for Steam, has 336 employees in 2021 per leaked data. Highlights include peak game spending in 2017, 79 staff for Steam, and high profitability per employee compared to tech giants. Collaboration with other firms due to small workforce.
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Valve, a major player in the gaming industry due to its PC gaming storefront Steam, was revealed to have a small staff of only 336 employees in 2021, as per leaked data from Wolfire's antitrust lawsuit. The data, spanning from 2003 to 2021, showed Valve's payroll distribution across different departments like "Admin," "Games," "Steam," and "Hardware." Noteworthy points include Valve's peak spending on games in 2017 at $221 million and employing just 79 people for Steam in 2021. Despite its limited staff, Valve's profitability per employee is claimed to surpass that of tech giants like Google and Amazon. The leaked data sheds light on Valve's spending on staff, hinting that it may be a fraction of the revenue generated by Steam. Valve's secretive nature and small workforce have led to collaborations with other companies for hardware and software development, reflecting its unique position in the gaming market.
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9 commentsIt might just be me, but that actually seems pretty reasonable.
What I've seen a lot is companies, during growth, accepting less-than-ideal candidates, maybe without a good onboarding, which then end up as deadweight in the worst case, and underperformers in the best case.
This, combined with a tendency to keep people around who have been there a long time, and the people themselves knowing they're not going to be let go, could result in massive companies and hundreds of people per product.
Yes steam is big, but it's not a product so complex you'd need over 100 people to maintain it. I assume other companies need so many people because tasks don't get done, and the logical step is to add people, not remove people.
Staying lean means staying agile (in some definition of the word), and that can speed you up.
It has a very low barrier to entry for devs and a permissive DRM compared to other stores. A powerful review system and a return policy better than anyone else I've seen so far. Very community friendly and has an entire feature dedicated to hosting user mods and creations. Right now they're wasting money on VR just because they can
Is it a monopoly when no one else is able to compete even on the technical side?
It's interesting there isn't a well-known real competitor to Steam (the Blizzard and Ubisoft stores, etc, don't count, because so few external parties publish there).
My gut says the lack of reinvestment could be someone else's opportunity, especially considering many of the longstanding VAC and other quality issues which have persisted on Steam's platform for more than 15 years. However, because of all the necessary catch-up, such an enterprise would be tricky to bootstrap and get to critical mass. Even then, where is the moat?
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