If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. 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 . As spotted , 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 able to uncover fully. The employee data starts with 2003, which is a few years after Valve’s 1996 founding and , and goes all the way up until 2021.
The data breaks Valve employees into four different groups: “Admin,” “Games,” “Steam,” and, starting in 2011, “Hardware.” If you want to sift through the numbers yourself, I’ve included a full table of the data, sorted by year and category, at the end of this story. One data point I found interesting: Valve peaked with its “Games” payroll spending in 2017 at $221 million (the company didn’t release any new games that year, but that spending could have gone toward supporting games like and developing new games like ); by 2021, that was down to $192 million.
Anot.
