Steam is run by less than 100 employees, legal documents reveal
It has been revealed that only 79 employees directly worked on the world's largest PC gaming platform as of a few years ago, and that Valve's hardware team is even smaller.
The details:
Valve is currently in a legal battle with Wolfire Games, the original creator of the Humble Bundle, accusing the PC gaming giant of using its large market share to inflate game prices and take a 30% cut of all sales, which "exploit[s] publishers and consumers". The original antitrust claim was filed in 2021 before being dismissed, with the second, active claim being filed a year later.
According to new lawsuit documents (via The Verge), Valve had only 336 employees as of 2021. Only 79 of those 336 were directly maintaining Steam, 41 were part of the hardware team behind the Steam Deck, and another 35 were assigned to administrative roles. Overall, Valve states that its games team had 181 employees at the time.
The Verge reported that the 79 employees working on Steam received a total of $76,446,633 in 2021, which is an average of more than $967,000 per person. The 41-person hardware team received $17,706,376 or an average of $431,000 each.
Valve has a very low headcount considering it is estimated to bring in about $6.5 billion in annual revenue, with EA and Ubisoft reporting lower figures during 2021 despite tens of thousands of employees between the two major publishers. Although the numbers are only estimates, it’s worth noting that its publicly available employee handbook states that its “profitability per employee is higher than that of Google or Amazon or Microsoft.”
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Nintendo has revealed that its recent horror trailer was for "Emio: The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club," the first original game in the Famicom Detective Club series since 1989.
