Counter Strike developers Valve only had 79 people working on Steam in 2021

As per a recent leaked document from Wolfire's antitrust lawsuit against Valve, first spotted by the creator of SteamDB, Pavel Djundik, revealed some interesting things about one of the biggest video game developers and distribution companies.

These included the employee count of the company for 2021 and how much they are being paid. The documents as per the Verge revealed that as of 2021, Valve only had 336 employees and while there is nothing wrong with that, it is much smaller compared to some of the other big game developers like Ubisoft, Electronic Arts and Microsoft game studios.

the wolfire v. valve case had a document published with request for redaction so it has a bunch of black boxes, but some data still remained under it like valves gross margins and commission for 2009-2021, and their employee counts and how much they pay them



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— Pavel Djundik (@thexpaw) July 12, 2024

Valve doing more with less

Moving on to the distribution, only 79 of those employees were working on Steam at the time, which is wild considering it is the largest video game distribution platform for PC gaming. 181 worked in the gaming department which was the most allocation of employees by Valve, so those wondering if Valve is even working on their games, they are but might just be short-handed.

The hardware development team included 41 people for developing stuff like the Steam Deck, which was highly successful on release, while the remaining 35 employees were in the admin department. Wolfire's lawsuit also reportedly mentions the low employee count.

Also Read: Counter Strike developers Valve is being sued for over $800 million

Wolfire claimed that the company only, “devotes a minuscule percentage of its revenue to maintaining and improving the Steam Store”. The Verge also reveals that the Valve employee handbook that is available to the public says that their profitability per employee is higher than most of the tech giants out there, including, Microsoft and Google.

The low count of employees is also understandable considering they do not release video games every year. However, at the same time, the constant update to their games and how well the platform is maintained is something else. Considering not much has changed apart from Counter-Strike getting a true sequel, the situation may be similar as of 2024.