Valve makes more money per employee than Amazon, Microsoft, and Netflix combined

[Daniel Sims]

The big picture: Valve is one of the most important and influential companies in the PC gaming market. It's also one of the most unique due to its private nature and unusually small workforce relative to its impact and competitors. A recent analysis of data uncovered through an ongoing lawsuit against the company highlights how Valve starkly contrasts with the world's biggest tech giants.

A Valve employee recently provided PC Gamer with a rough calculation of the company's per-employee income, revealing that Valve generates more money per person than several of the world's largest companies. While the data is a few years old and doesn't account for some significant recent trends in the tech sector, Valve's ranking in this metric likely hasn't shifted much over that time.

Exact figures for Valve's per-hour and per-employee net income remain redacted. However, a chart from 2018 confirms that Valve's per-employee income exceeded that of companies like Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Alphabet/Google, Microsoft, Intel, and Amazon.

Click to enlarge

Facebook's second-place ranking of $780,400 per employee – or $89 per hour – likely stands far ahead of competitors such as Apple and Microsoft because Facebook employs just under 70,000 employees compared to the two PC giants, which each have workforces over twice that number. By contrast, Amazon, with a headcount of over 1.5 million, earned only around $15,892 per employee, or $1.81 per hour.

Filings from a 2021 antitrust lawsuit brought by Wolfire Games revealed that Valve employed just 336 people at the time – fewer than the development team for Baldur's Gate 3. Despite this relatively tiny workforce, Valve oversees Steam, which hosts nearly 40 million daily users and dominates the PC game sales market. Wolfire cited this discrepancy as evidence that Steam's 30 percent revenue commission for most titles is unjustified.

Notably, the available data doesn't reflect the impact of the Steam Deck, Valve's handheld gaming PC, which launched in 2022. It's unclear to what extent Valve hired or outsourced additional staff for the device's development and production, but it's unlikely the company expanded its workforce anywhere near the scale of other tech giants.

Valve would likely remain at the top of a per-employee income ranking based on current data. However, recent trends such as widespread layoffs and the ongoing AI boom could shift the standings for other companies. It would also be intriguing to see whether Nvidia has entered the ranking, as the AI explosion has propelled its profits to new heights, recently making it the newest member of the $3 trillion club.

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Valve makes more money per employee than Amazon, Microsoft, and Netflix combined

 

[toooooot]

Only Amazon employs brazilion more people. Remind me how many people Valve pays salaries, 200?
You would need 100 thousand more companies like Valve to provide as many jobs.

 

[FaTaL]

If I had to guess, Valve is probably earning close to $5 million per employee.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Only Amazon employs brazilion more people. Remind me how many people Valve pays salaries, 200?
You would need 100 thousand more companies like Valve to provide as many jobs.

It goes to show the larger a company becomes, the more wasteful it's workforce and hiring practices grow.

 

[alexnode]

The reality is that they just maintain a sales platform, and earn 30% of profits. Game developers build their pages so valve is just creating a template. They contract worldwide CDNs and add a few features every few months. The steam deck and valve index was the only productive thing they have done in the last 10 years. Epic and GOG at least they still making games.

 

[JohnRambo4]

With that kind of money you'd think they could afford HL3.

 

[retrodeg]

The reality is that they just maintain a sales platform, and earn 30% of profits. Game developers build their pages so valve is just creating a template. They contract worldwide CDNs and add a few features every few months. The steam deck and valve index was the only productive thing they have done in the last 10 years. Epic and GOG at least they still making games.

Valve has put out at least 2 new games, half life alyx and deadlock. More if you count cs2 as a new game and there's also aperture desk job.

 

[Fugazi]

Only Amazon employs brazilion more people. Remind me how many people Valve pays salaries, 200?
You would need 100 thousand more companies like Valve to provide as many jobs.

Has nothing to do with the article.

 

[toooooot]

Has nothing to do with the article.

Thank you for letting me know.

 

[Gars]

Ubi will cut that in a hair and says - they deserve it
valve will give you a hand shake, even you dont deserve it

 

[Bzored]

Only Amazon employs brazilion more people. Remind me how many people Valve pays salaries, 200?
You would need 100 thousand more companies like Valve to provide as many jobs.

Are you able to read? At all? It says in the sub heading.

 

[entropy3]

The reality is that they just maintain a sales platform, and earn 30% of profits. Game developers build their pages so valve is just creating a template. They contract worldwide CDNs and add a few features every few months. The steam deck and valve index was the only productive thing they have done in the last 10 years. Epic and GOG at least they still making games.

What game has epic done? Fortnite? That's one of the most garbage piece of hot trash we've seen in decades. Anything else? No? Got it.

 

[mailpup]

Are you able to read? At all? It says in the sub heading.

To be fair, the subheading doesn't show up in forum mode.

 

[toooooot]

What game has epic done? Fortnite? That's one of the most garbage piece of hot trash we've seen in decades. Anything else? No? Got it.

Doesn't Epic take smaller tax?

 

[Axeia]

And unlike the tech giants (except maybe Apple) they're mostly seen in a positive light.

Although maybe not for much longer

I always thought valve being privately owned is a good thing as they avoid making the typical investor driven bad choices. If it was publicly owned I'm sure theyd be asking all those profile customisation options for money rather than points and offering game publishers a premium service to curate customer reviews. But as the video above shows they can also use it not disclose certain things in their favour.

 

[GTvon]

It goes to show the larger a company becomes, the more wasteful it's workforce and hiring practices grow.

No it shows that a company that does millions more things needs millions more people to do those things. Lol

 

[GTvon]

Has nothing to do with the article.

?

 

[JuanDegr]

Valve certainly didn’t become obsessed with stashing the money away.

Oh no, their employee recruiting strategy over the years is proof of that.

HL3 is being worked on as we speak, and it will meet all expectations—just like Duke Nukem Forever did. It just takes one or two decades longer since they (unfortunately, because Sarah left in November and Kevin doesn’t start until January) don’t have enough people at Valve to code the game. Most devs are busy fixing Steam client bugs or handling mod duty.

I’ll get my coat.

 

[DrSuess]

Well, isn't Valve primarily a digital services company at this point. Outside of the marketplace most of Valve's business comes in passively when people seek them out to purchase a game. Microsoft and Amazon have much more diverse businesses that employ hundreds of thousands of employees world wide.

Microsoft has a market cap of $3.20 Trillion, and Amazon has a $2.35 Trillion market cap, So Valve making more money per employee than Amazon, Microsoft, and Netflix combined isn't that much of an important statistic, it is an interesting anecdote.

 

[SimplyFactual]

Valve's only major product release recently, the OLED Steam Deck, was a quiet disaster.

Every one of Valve's new devices had a faulty 3.5mm jack due to a universal design flaw (though some buyers likely still haven't noticed) and a multitude of other problems appeared upon release, from screens to buttons, with wildly inconsistent sourcing of parts for the same production run of the same device.

Valve's service team was instructed to turn away requests for repair or replacement, until the overwhelming amount of complaints about their new device forced them to comply or face consequences in the popular press.

If the article's right about Valve's resources for the botched Steam Deck OLED working outside the company as hired-gun third parties, it explains a lot. Valve itself seemed to have no idea what to do or how many service staff it needed. This, from a company that has developed (supposedly) and sold multiple mass-market hardware devices for many years... including a slightly different version of the same Steam Deck. Yet they appeared entirely unprepared for the release of this one, which, again, makes sense if Valve has no idea how its own products get made or serviced.

The dubious credit due Valve comes down to a crack public relations team that massaged coverage of their catastrophic rollout. The fumbled release of the Steam Deck OLED should have been covered as one of the biggest disaster stories of the year for consumer technology. Instead, only a few specialty YouTubers even noticed.

 

[jimjimmyjim]

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