The company Valve is behind the dominant PC platform Steam and makes a fortune, solely through its flagship shooter Counter-Strike GO and the huge skin trading that happens there. A lot of money also comes in through Steam: After all, Valve takes 30% from every sale. From a lawsuit by the developer Wolfire, we learn how small the company actually is. Even the developer behind Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian, is bigger.
Why do we learn this? Valve is not a publicly traded company, but privately owned. Most shares are owned by Gabe Newell (62, cover photo). The business magazine Forbes estimates that he owns 50.1% of the shares in Valve. His fortune is estimated at $9.5 billion.
Because Valve is not listed on the stock exchange, many of the details we take for granted about other companies—because they have to disclose these figures to their investors—are kept under wraps at Valve.
But a legal dispute against Valve by “Wolfire Games” gives us rare insights. Wolfire Games (Overgrowth) is an indie developer that sued Valve in 2021, alleging that they were using their dominant market power to harm competition and drive up game prices.
Valve has few games, but they are extremely successful, like DOTA 2:
Valve had fewer employees in 2021 than the Belgian developer of Baldur’s Gate 3
How big is Valve? In 2021, Valve only had 336 employees.
The site PC Gamer compares how tiny this is and lists the employee numbers we know from large studios:
- Ubisoft has 18,666 employees
- Electronic Arts stands at about 13,700 employees
- The last count of Activision Blizzard, before the merger with Microsoft, was 13,000 employees
- Even the developer of Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian Studios, has 470 employees
How many work on Steam? In 2021, of the 336 employees at Valve, only 79 worked directly on Steam. 181 worked in the gaming department, 41 on hardware projects, and 35 were involved in administration.
What is so impressive then? Wolfire accused Valve of putting too little of their revenue into the development of their Steam store. Yet their revenues are monstrous.
A Valve employee created a statistic during the lawsuit showing how much money an employee generates per hour for their company and how much in total over the year.
In his statistics, he leaves out Valve, but it becomes clear that a Valve employee apparently generates even more than someone at Facebook or Apple. And those companies are already making impressive profits: A Facebook employee generates €780,400 for their company – a Valve employee could possibly pull in even a million dollars.
And these are figures from 2018.
With such numbers, the objections of Steam’s biggest competitor become even more credible. Tim Sweeney, the head of Epic Games, has complained for at least 5 years that Steam takes 30% from each sale and that this money is missing in the development of games. 12% would suffice, says Sweeney. But then they might make less money than Apple, and who can afford that? Epic says: We will stop exclusive deals if Steam only takes 12%
