As first noted by SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik and reported by The Verge, documents from the antitrust case against Valve show that Valve had 336 employees in 2021. While Steam continues to shape the entire PC gaming landscape, it is still a fraction of the size of most major game publishers.

This document stems from Wolfire Games' 2021 lawsuit alleging that Steam constitutes an unfair monopoly in PC digital distribution. The document remains partially redacted, and presumably all important details should have been completely blacked out.

The Verge has a complete chart of Valve's annual headcount and salaries by department. The chart confirms that the company's overall headcount has remained fairly stable over the past decade; in 2016 we reported that the company had about 360 employees, and Wikipedia cited that the company had 330 employees in 2013.

Here's the topline for 2021: of these 336 employees, 79 are directly involved with Steam and a whopping 181 remain in the "games" department, considering how important Steam is to the company's profits and how rare it is for Valve to release new games and that's almost the opposite of what I expected. At the time, on the eve of Steam Deck's launch, only 41 employees were working on hardware development, with the remaining 35 in administration.

Wolfire games actually criticized this limited headcount in its lawsuit, claiming that Valve "devotes a very small percentage of its revenue to maintaining and improving the Steam store." A People Make Games report last year, citing interviews with anonymous former Valve employees, suggested that Valve's "flat" corporate structure was hurting its employees.

Even allowing for these problems, the company, which manages one of the central pillars of PC gaming, Steam (there is a reason why many gamers prefer Steam over other launchers, despite its problems for developers) and revolutionized portable PC gaming with the Steam Deck It's hard not to be impressed by the overwhelming effectiveness of the And whenever the company releases a new game (or even updates an existing one), it is always an event.

To put Valve in perspective, we've compiled a list of some notable publishers and developers, along with their respective numbers.