Valve's Financial Data Leaked in Lawsuit Employee Numbers and Salaries Revealed

TapTechNews July 14th news, a lawsuit against Valve unexpectedly disclosed some of the company's financial data. Valve is a well-known game developer and operates the world's largest PC game platform, Steam, as well as the recently released popular handheld game console SteamDeck.

These leaked documents come from a lawsuit filed by independent game developer WolfireGames against Valve. WolfireGames alleges that Valve monopolizes the PC game market through the operation of the Steam platform.

The leaked information shows that there are four main departments within Valve: the administrative department, the game development department, the Steam platform department, and the hardware department. The documents contain the number of employees and financial data of these four departments from 2003 to 2021. As of 2021, Valve has a total of 336 employees. Considering the successful release of SteamDeck in early 2022 is bound to require an expansion of the hardware department, so the current total number of employees may be higher.

The data shows that in 2021, only 79 employees were responsible for maintaining the huge Steam platform, and their total compensation that year was 76,446,633 US dollars. TapTechNews noted that the game development department peaked in 2019 with 201 employees and a total compensation of 236,798,782 US dollars that year. It is worth mentioning that the administrative department has only 35 employees, but its total compensation in 2021 was as high as 157,999,567 US dollars.

The financial data such as Valve's revenue and profit are still not publicly available, and this may not change in the foreseeable time. However, Valve's public manual for new employees mentions that the company's profit margin is higher than that of companies such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.