Tl,dr: About a million dollars annually per employee.
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I’m more curious as to how many contractors work for Valve.
Just because they aren’t a direct employee doesn’t mean other people don’t work for Valve. They don’t seem to have “janitorial” or anything like it on there, so I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume like almost all US companies, that they contract out a lot of the “bitch work” so they don’t have to pay “regular people” well or let them be part of that “flat management” structure. Someone cleans up those offices, and it probably isn’t the devs or anyone directly employed by Valve.
It’s easy to act like your profits per employee are insane when half your employees are actually “contractors” and don’t count toward your employee numbers somehow.
EDIT: According to Glassdoor, they absolutely use contract work, so these numbers are a farce. So much for Valve being the perfect good guys or whatever… Good guys don’t use contract labor as a way to pay people less than they’re worth.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Valve-Corporation-Contractor-Reviews-EI_IE24849.0,17_KO18,28.htm
What in the world are you talking about. Using contractors is not “paying people less than they’re worth”.
Have you actually looked into what contract janitors make? Its not crazy amounts of money or anything, but it is enough to live comfortably in a place like Seattle, which is more than you can say for a lot of “better” jobs.
People Make Games made a video about Valve’s structure as well if anyone is interested.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
As spotted by SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik, some data in the document was viewable despite the black redaction boxes, including Valve’s headcount and gross pay across various parts of the company over 18 years, and even some data about its gross margins that we weren’t able to uncover fully.
The data breaks Valve employees into four different groups: “Admin,” “Games,” “Steam,” and, starting in 2011, “Hardware.”
If you want to sift through the numbers yourself, I’ve included a full table of the data, sorted by year and category, at the end of this story.
In November 2023, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais told The Verge that he thinks “we’re firmly in the camp of being a full fledged hardware company by now.”
The small number of staff across the board seemingly explains why Valve’s product list is so limited despite its immense business as basically the de facto PC gaming platform.
While we haven’t seen any leaked profit numbers from this new headcount and payroll data, the figures give a more detailed picture of how much Valve is spending on its staff — which, given the massive popularity of Steam, is probably still just a fraction of the money the company is pulling in.
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