Valve, the owner of the Steam platform and maker of the Steam Deck, is one of the most efficient companies in the world. Research firm Alinea Analytics' head of market analysis posted on X that the Steam platform alone has already made $16.2 billion in revenue, with some suggesting that the company as a whole will hit $17 billion in 2025. The company employee count between 2012 and 2021 averaged around 350 people, according to some estimates. This means that the gaming company is making almost $50 million per employee.
Steam has generated $16B+ in revenue so far this year (@alineaanalytics estimates)That's already up 5.7% from 2024's final total!Taking Valve's cuts into account (and 100% cuts of its own juggernauts CS2 and Dota 2), Valve itself has made over $4B+ this year from Steam. pic.twitter.com/PlMCjDEEgDNovember 13, 2025
Wolfire, an independent game studio that sued Valve in 2021, said that the company had around 360 employees, as noted by The Verge. For comparison, in the same year, Microsoft said that the game company had an estimated revenue of $6.5 billion, meaning it's roughly bringing in $18 million+ per head.
Those figures would still be double the amount that the employees of other leading companies are making. According to Visual Capitalist, a healthcare company called McKesson is the Revenue per Employee leader, but we see it 'only' raked in $8.2 million per employee. Tech company employees are even less impactful on revenue, with Apple making $2.4 million per employee and Meta (Facebook’s parent company) bringing in only $1.9 million per employee.
Valve itself is aware of this. It’s publicly available Handbook for New Employees [PDF], first printed in 2012, 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.” The company claims it has one of the best compensation packages in the industry, and we can see this in the leaked data shared by The Verge, which shows that Valve spent nearly $450 million on employee salaries, with a weighted average of more than $1.3 million per employee.
The company likely achieved this because it’s a completely privately owned corporation, beholden to neither stockholders nor private equity. So, its owners, such as Gabe Newell himself, plus some other partners, can focus on the long-term viability of the company instead of pushing it to maximize returns at the expense of gamers and publishers. It also has a unique, flat company structure, where everyone works as team members and there are no managers or C-suite executives.
Although no company is perfect (Valve was one of the first to popularise loot boxes in PC gaming), it has arguably done a lot for the gaming community and the industry as a whole. Aside from its iconic titles, like Counter-Strike, Dota 2, and Left 4 Dead, it also revolutionized how we buy games through Steam and opened the world to many smaller developers. The company also revived the handheld gaming industry when it dropped the Steam Deck in 2022, and we’re looking forward to the upcoming Steam Machine, expected to arrive in 2026.
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