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