Valve runs its massive PC gaming ecosystem with only about 350 employees

Enlarge / Artist’s conception of Valve’s micro-employees hard at work inside your Steam installation (credit: Getty Images)

As a private and generally secretive company, Valve doesn’t offer much outside visibility into its inner workings. So when years’ worth of data on the company’s employee and aggregate payroll numbers leaked recently, we were eager to take a deep dive to see what those numbers could tell us about the operation and evolution of a company that has a hand in the majority of PC gaming transactions.

The recent data comes from a poorly redacted document in Wolfire’s antitrust lawsuit against Steam, as first noticed over the weekend by SteamDB’s Pavel Djundik. While the key data in the document has now been properly hidden in the court docket, The Verge captured the raw numbers from a table labeled “Employee Headcount and Gross Pay Data, 2003-2021.”

Breaking down that data by year and department with some simple graphs and statistics, seen below, gives us outsiders a rare partial glimpse into Valve’s organization. All told, it’s a bit hard to believe that this lynchpin of the PC gaming world has rested on the work of just a few hundred people for many years now.