Valve makes almost $50 million per employee, raking in more cash per person than Google, Amazon, or Microsoft — gaming giant's 350 employees on track to generate $17 billion this year

Revenue. Revenue is not profit.

Correct. The article is discussing revenue.
- The headline is misleading, it was worth mentioning.
Then again, somehow I don’t expect Valve’s expenditures are that high, except download server costs.
- Eh, that could also include sales revenue, of which Valve pays out 70% to right holders.
- People are the biggest cost for sure. Then servers probably.

The business hive mind cannot comprehend a company making so much money without shareholders demanding line go up every hour

I wonder if they're also getting paid more or does greedy Gabe just take it all to fund his mega yachts.

Did a little digging, apparently in a 2021 lawsuit, documents were released with bad redactions (they blacked out over the data, but the underlying information was still able to be highlighted and copied/pasted. Very common error when redacting PDFs)
I haven’t checked the data myself but according one user this was the breakdown:
“Total staff as of 2021: 336 people
Administration: 35 people making an average of 4.5 million a year
Game Developers: 181 people making an average of 1 million a year
Steam Developers: 79 people making an average of 960k a year
Hardware Developers: 41 people making average of 430k a year”
Normally I would guess that “average” here probably means a few people making a ton of money while others get shafted. But I think “admin” probably accounts for that. We have no official way of knowing the true breakdown since this info is not supposed to be public
- This actually seems like not a terrible spread. The average for the top earners is a little more than 10x the average for the lowest earners... Obviously outliers could be skewing that data (there could be one hardware developer making 30 million while the others work for poverty wages) but from the data we have, this isn't nearly as wide a gap as I would have expected.
- What does administration mean there? Like accounting, human resources and so? How could they make, in average, way more that developers??
A highschool friends dad worked at Valve and they'd take the entire company and their families to Hawaii every year.
Seemed like a good place to work.
Would make him the first billionaire in history to pay his workers their worth, so.... Not a fucking chance.
No no Gabe just works 31.244.670 times as much as his employees.
Hey that's not fair.
Gabe is also spending all that money on Aston Martins Valkyries to race around the world.
capitalism gonna capitalism, man. you know the answer.

Not hard, if you don't have 20k employees.

I can't wait for your company to do the same. You know, because it's not hard. Heck, I invite you to do the same with 10 employees, since it's so not hard.
- I said it's not hard to reach that high of a revenue per head measure if you don't have 20k employees.
  Google, MS and so much other mega corps have a similar revenue (dunno exact numbers), so they obviously have lower numbers.
  So calm down.

That tends to happen when you have a monopoly on an industry where you get 30% of the revenue from other people's hard work.

Remind me again which game developer had to release their game on Steam? Or which publisher had no choice but to market on the platform? And are you the sole user forced to use Steam, or was that someone else...?
- If I want my game to sell I have to release on Steam, though.
- Doesn't make it less of a monopoly.
- Yeah, why do you buy things if you're against capitalism? Checkmate.
- All of them.
- I see what you're going for, but most people seem to choose money over doing the right thing. Which brings us right back to capitalism ruining everything, again.
I wouldn't describe it as a "monopoly" per say. I'd describe it as "all of the competition is filled with idiots":
Go do your own game shop with the feature set of steam.
We have seen how well that was executed with Epic.
I wouldnt even call the GOG implementation bad but it obviously lacks the PR in comparison (+ games like CP2077 are also available on Steam)
- You could defend Amazon with that logic. the fact that the barrier of entry is high is exactly what let's Steam, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo abuse of their soft monopoly.
  Nothing justifies owning a billion dollars worth of of boats.
Mono=one poly=seller... and last I checked Steam is not the only seller of video games. They aren't even the only seller of digital video games. They aren't even the only seller of digital video games for SteamOS.
They are the largest because they do what's right by their customers and employees. As a 'for instance', I bought Portal 2 for the PS3 many years ago. I no longer have my PS3 but I can still play Portal 2 (as well as Portal which was just thrown in for me) on any PC.
- Technically Steam is not a monopoly, but the way people commonly use the term these days is as simple as "majority market share".
- Ah OK, so the classic monopolies in American History (Standard Oil - controlled 90% of its market; American Tobacco - controlled 80% of its market) were not monopolies.

Does anyone know how Valve rate on privacy? Do they aggressively data mine and sell it in the surveillance economy?

Do they have any kind of profit sharing program?

I'd be kind of pissed if I worked there and made like $70k or whatever, only to read this shit.

Their lowest paid employees still very likely make 6 figures. Valve has historically taken very good care of their employees.
Doubt it. But, for what it's worth, last I heard, valve was one of the most sought after employers in the business. Apparently the salaries are generous and you get to work on whatever you want, not on what a manager tells you to.
- If I remember correctly they have performance based bonuses
Levels.fyi data from 1 October 2025 reveals senior engineers at £206,000 ($375,000) total, but Valve's equity-heavy model amplifies this, drawing top talent without micromanagement.
This article was here the other day and made it sound like employees are treated very well.

Valve still makes a ton of money from kids gambling. They don't care about anything else than money and yet gamers keeps kissing their ass.

Call me a shill, but Valve's actions indicate that they care about the money that comes from improving a product or service. That differentiates them from many publicly traded companies that care about money at the expense of the quality of their own products and services.
- Both things can be true. They make good products while also making millions from kids gambling.

They probably should hire more people and reduce profits. But you can't just hire anybody and that's a lot of work.

This is revenue not profit. They need to pay their operating costs with these funds. Their operating costs are probably pretty high considering their global network and distribution. Hiring more people would likely have a minimal impact on their operating costs and each new person may not contribute much to their revenue considering their business model.
- Didn't catch that, thanks. What is their actual profit before personal cost?
That's how you go from sustainable to unsustainable due to chasing constant exponential growth then eventual enshitification that hits consumers to try to recoup all the lost money.
You're describing the shitty business models of publicly traded companies that hire thousands then lay off thousands and keep trying to do whatever they can to raise stock prices due to not targetting a sustainable stable company for the longterm but quarter by quarter profit targets.
That steam has been more conservative with hiring is probably why they've been able to have the resources to go into hardware even if it flops unlike EA, Ubisoft, and Epic despite having way more employees.
why?
- In order to provide more goods and services to their customers to entrench their position.