Valve, the owner of Steam is a small company with huge paychecks, the court found that out

Court documents show that Valve, the owner of the Steam game store and manufacturer of the Steam Deck console, has a small staff and a huge payroll.

The data was disclosed as part of an active lawsuit against Valve by indie game developer Wolfire Games. The plaintiff claims that Valve unfairly dominates the computer game industry because of how the Steam service operates. Although a significant amount of information about the case was hidden, SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik posted a link to the data on his X account. The document was later deleted, but The Verge subsequently published unedited financial data from the document in a table.

The data indicates that Valve has four departments: administration, games, Steam, and hardware. Financial data and the number of employees for each of these subdivisions cover the period from 2003 to 2021. As of 2021, Valve had 336 employees. It is quite likely that the total number of staff is currently higher, partly due to the successful launch of the Steam Deck in early 2022, which almost certainly prompted Valve's hardware department to hire more people.

Only 79 Valve employees worked on Steam in 2021. The gross pay for the Steam team members was $76,446,633. In the "Games" section, Valve reached a peak of 201 employees in 2019 with a gross payroll of $236,798,782. In 2021, the "Administration" section had only 35 employees, but the gross payroll reached a staggering $157,999,567.

Despite the interest in information about the total number of game employees, there is no data on Valve's revenue and profits. However, the new data confirms information from Valve's published handbook - the company claims that the profit per employee is "higher than Google, Amazon, or Microsoft."

Source: The Verge