Valve, which operates Steam, has only 336 employees as of 2021, and the average annual salary is estimated to be 200 million yen.
Valve, which operates the PC game sales platform 'Steam,' has been subject to numerous antitrust lawsuits due to its enormous market power. Documents released in conjunction with the trial reveal the number of employees and salaries of Valve.
Here's how much Valve pays its staff — and how few people it employs - The Verge
Valve runs its massive PC gaming ecosystem with only about 350 employees | Ars Technica
Pavel Jundic , a programmer at the Steam database site SteamDB , reported on July 12, 2024 that various data had become available to view because the confidentiality of documents related to the antitrust lawsuit filed by Wolfire Games against Valve in April 2021 had not been complete.
the wolfire v. valve case had a document published with request for redaction so it has a bunch of black boxes, but some data still remained under it like valves gross margins and commission for 2009-2021, and their employee counts and how much they pay them
— Pavel Djundik (@thexpaw) July 12, 2024
█████████
Many of the documents were blacked out, and some of the item names that indicate the meaning of the numbers in the tables were also concealed. However, foreign media The Verge inferred the trends in Valve's number of employees and total paid wages from the title of one table, 'Employee Headcount and Gross Pay Data, 2003-2021.'
The data that was available included employee numbers and salary data from 2003 to 2021. Below is the number of employees at Valve and their breakdown. As of 2003, Valve had 78 employees, but by 2021, the number had increased to 336. Valve has four departments: Admin, Games, Steam, and Hardware, and it has become clear that most of the employees belong to the game development department.
On the other hand, foreign media ArsTechnica said about Valve's number of employees, 'Compared to other companies in the game industry, Valve's number of employees is surprisingly small.' According to ArsTechnica, Valve's annual revenue is $650 million (about 1.1 trillion yen), which is almost the same as the annual revenue of industry leader
Microsoft estimated Valve's revenue in 2021 at $6.5bn
— Piers Harding-Rolls (@PiersHR) September 19, 2023
Interesting to see another view on the scale of Valve's business pic.twitter.com/ziKdXNxni3
The document also reveals information about the salaries that Valve pays to its employees. The graph below shows Valve's total salary, which has been steadily increasing since 2003 and reached approximately $450 million in 2021.
Therefore, the average annual salary of employees in 2021 is expected to be $1.32 million (approximately 205 million yen). However, the majority of the salary is allocated to employees in the administrative department, and in the graph below, the average annual salary of employees in the administrative department shown in orange was $4.5 million (approximately 700 million yen) as of 2021, while the average annual salary of employees in the game development department, Steam operation department, and hardware development department was at most about $1 million (approximately 155 million yen).
Valve has not commented on this report.
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