Court documents show Valve still focuses mostly on games, but it’s smaller than you’d think

For being one of the most important companies in the PC gaming world, Valve is typically quite a mystery when it comes to its inner workings. The creator of Steam, fronted by co-founder and president Gabe Newell, doesn’t typically reveal much about its size or structure. Yet for all the jokes around Half-Life 3, Left 4 Dead 3, Portal 3, and so on, as rumors swirl around its supposed new game Deadlock, court documents show that a majority of Valve staff are still focused on making games.

This latest information comes from documents included in the 2021 antitrust lawsuit filed by indie developer Wolfire Games against Valve, which argues that the Steam creator “abuses its market power to ensure game publishers have no choice but to sell most of their games through the Steam Store.” Of course, despite the vast selection available on the platform, Valve’s own offerings typically remain among the biggest and best PC games at any time.

The Valve document in question, spotted by SteamDB creator Pavel Djundiik and detailed by The Verge, contains “Employee headcount and gross pay data, 2003-2021.” While aspects of the document are redacted, the columns showing these two data counts are still visible, giving us some insight into the number of people working within each area of Valve.

Of these, the 2021 numbers list 181 people assigned to ‘games,’ with 35 working in admin, 41 on hardware, and 79 on Steam itself. That combines to a total of just 336 staff members, which is astonishingly small for a company of such significant stature. For comparison, Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian Studios employs around 470 people, while Ubisoft lists its count at 21,000.

Nevertheless, it shows that more than half of Valve’s staff (at least as of 2021) are still focused primarily on making games. Perhaps that shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise; the company launched Half-Life: Alyx in March 2020, the reworked Artifact: Foundry in March 2021, Aperture Desk Job in March 2022, Counter-Strike 2 in September 2023 and continues ongoing development for that along with regular updates for Dota 2.

There’s also almost certainly development underway on new projects, with Valve having long been known as a company that encourages experimentation. Currently, signs point to the rumored next Valve game Deadlock, which is supposedly a 6v6 competitive FPS with Dota-style lanes and hero characters reminiscent of TF2 and Overwatch. Whether that project exists as suggested – and if it will actually make it to launch – is something we’ll just have to wait to find out.

The report also highlights some other interesting data. The Steam-specific headcount, which peaked at 142 in 2015, had fallen dramatically to just 79 staff members by 2021, almost half of its former number. Comparatively, while the number of games-focused employees dropped slightly, from a high of 201 in 2019 down to 181 in 2021, this feels more like a case of natural fluctuation.

Ultimately, despite changes over the years Valve continues to deliver a storefront that, for the most part, does exactly what its consumer-side users want in delivering games with relatively unerring consistency. As for what comes next on the game side of things, we’ll be sure to keep you up to date when its next game emerges. We have reached out to Valve for comment on this story, and will include any response as we get it.

In the meantime, here are the best free Steam games to play in 2024, and you can keep an eye out for when the next Steam sale starts for lots more bargains to bag.

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