A few hundred employees working on "self-directed projects" has made Valve one of the world's most profitable-per-person companies, on track to top $17 billion this year and shame the likes of Google and Meta

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You get a yacht, and you get a yacht

Official Half-Life 2 artwork from Valve showing protagonist Gordon Freeman wrangling with an alien creature
(Image credit: Valve)

Analyst estimates of Valve's annual revenue is already around 6% higher than the whole of 2024, meaning it is on track to surpass $17 billion by the end of the year. While this number is already staggering, it is even more impressive in context of how many people the company employs, with likely less than 400 staff members working at the gaming giant.

Steam's owner Valve is one of the few independent gaming companies of its size, and this means that despite how much money it makes, it's able to hold its cards close to its chest. This is where analysts help us out, with Alinea Analytics estimating that the company has already earned more than $16.3 billion in the first 11 months of this year.

Despite Valve's momentous revenue, it only has a few hundred employees. The last time employee information was made public was in 2024, when court documents from 2021 that weren't properly redacted were discovered. As reported by The Verge, the company claimed to have just 336 employees on the payroll, but has likely expanded due to the launch of the Steam Deck.

Working with estimates, Valve likely earns $40 - 50 million per employee, blowing companies like Google, Meta, and Microsoft out of the water. The Xbox parent company makes the most of the three (I'm sure in no small part due to its history of mass layoffs), but it isn't even close to big daddy Valve at just $18 million per staff member.

Valve has been aware that it's on to a winning formula since at least 2012 when it wrote some industry-standard-breaking statements in its still available employee handbook. Not only does the book inform employees that "100%" of their work will be "self-directed projects", but that their pay will be directly correlated with what they produce.

"Valve pays people very well compared to industry norms," the book states. "Our profitability per employee is higher than that of Google or Amazon or Microsoft, and we believe strongly that the right thing to do in that case is to put a maximum amount of money back into each employee’s pocket. Valve does not win if you’re paid less than the value you create. And people who work here ultimately don’t win if they get paid more than the value they create."

While this last statement looks like a way of paying Valve staff less than desireably, the above mentioned court documents showed that the average Valve employee earned $1.3 million per year back in 2021. Might not be the $50 million that Valve is raking in per person, but Gabe Newell needs to buy his yachts somehow, eh?

Steam Machine price "more in line with what you might expect from the current PC market," confirms Valve – but "ideally we'd be pretty competitive with that and have a pretty good deal."

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George Young
George Young
Freelance News Writer

Freelance writer, full-time PlayStation Vita enthusiast, and speaker of some languages. I break up my days by watching people I don't know play Pokemon pretty fast.

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