The company Valve is behind the dominant PC platform Steam and makes a fortune just through its flagship shooter Counter-Strike GO and the huge skin trade that goes on there. A lot of money also comes in via Steam: Valve takes 30% of every sale. Through a lawsuit filed by the developer Wolffire, we learn how small the company actually is. Even the developer behind Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian, is bigger.
Why do we find out about this? Valve is not a listed company, but rather privately owned. Most of the shares belong to Gabe Newell (62, cover photo). The business magazine Forbes assumes 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, a lot of the information that we naturally know about other companies because they have to report these numbers to their investors is kept secret at Valve.
But a lawsuit against Valve by “Wolfire Games” gives us rare insight. Wolfire Games (Overgrowth) is an indie developer that calcified Valve in 2021, accusing it of using its dominant market power to hurt competition and drive up the price of games.
Valve has few games, but they are extremely successful, like DOTA 2:
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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 PC Gamer website shows how tiny this is in comparison and gives the employee numbers that we know from large studios:
How many of them work on Steam? In 2021, of the 336 employees at Valve, only 79 worked directly on Steam. 181 worked in the game department, 41 on hardware projects and 35 took care of administration.
Then what’s so impressive? Wolfire accused Valve of dedicating too little of its revenue to the further development of its Steam shop. But their sales are monstrous.
As part of the legal dispute, a Valve employee created statistics that show how much money an employee earns for his company per hour and also how much in total per year.
He omits Valve from his statistics, but it turns out that a Valve employee apparently earns even more than someone at Facebook or Apple. And the companies are already making an impressive profit: a Facebook employee earns his company €780,400 – a Valve employee could perhaps even make a million US dollars.
And these are numbers from 2018.
With numbers like that, the objections of Steam’s biggest competitor become more credible. Tim Sweeney, the boss of Epic Games, has been complaining for at least 5 years that Steam takes 30% of every sale and that this money is missing from the further development of games. 12% would be enough, said Sweeney. But then you might make less money than Apple, and who can be responsible for that? Epic says: We will stop exclusive deals when Steam only takes a 12% share