Damn, working for Valve pays very well.
What a great company!
Here’s how much Valve pays its staff — and how few people it employs
Submitted 4 months ago by nave@lemmy.ca to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24197477/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-payroll-redacted
Comments
systemglitch@lemmy.world 4 months ago
firadin@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Because they don’t pay any of their actual workforce: the game devs they steal 30% from for every game sold.
GiveMemes@jlai.lu 4 months ago
You mean the game devs that they take 30% from in a contract the devs agree to in order to list their game on the largest PC gaming store?
Besides that, steam has an incredibly low financial requirement to start selling your games on their platform. $100 usd per game (at least in the US) and you get it back if your game sells enough copies (100 maybe? I forget tbh.) It’s a great platform for indie devs which is why we’ve seen indie PC gaming boom so much in the past decade or so especially.
CriticalMiss@lemmy.world 4 months ago
You mean the game devs they provide CDN at no additional costs, networking features a dev environment that is far more comfortable than any competitor and various additional revenue streams (such as trading cards and items)?
BigSadDad@lemmy.world 4 months ago
This thread contains a lot of great bangers. But let’s play devil’s advocate for just a minute.
Let me know when you build a global distribution platform with 5-9 uptime, credit card processing, full compliance with all of the various laws in all the countries you serve and also provide a cdn for my game for free.
I’ll be waiting. You better pull through on this, you owe the community your labor
Kolanaki@yiffit.net 4 months ago
If you don’t want a publisher to take a cut: self-publish. Evwry publisher takes a cut. Valve just takes 10% more than everyone else, while also providing more than anyone else to those devs.
explore_broaden@midwest.social 4 months ago
I prefer not to buy games on steam, and when a game is available from another channel (for example Factorio is available on the devs’ website) I will buy it there. And yet, most games are only on steam, so the devs really don’t seem to care about trying to avoid that 30% cut when they can.
Tier1BuildABear@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Tell me you know nothing about the gaming industry without telling me lol
Crampon@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Gabe is the smartest guy in business. Guy is rolling in cash, only for himself and those he choose to share it with.
Idk what they teach you in business school, but it’s probably wrong.
cheers_queers@lemm.ee 4 months ago
i took one year of business school, and they teach you to offshore outsource as much as possible and to prioritize your shareholders at all costs. so, nothing surprising.
Retrograde@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Ah, good old American business
Zipitydew@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
It’s just the Jack Welsh playbook over and over. Even though people finally started to realize Jack was a fucking idiot and ruined GE.
He got rich. But fucked one of the most well known and respected companies in the world doing it.
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 4 months ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:
As spotted by SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik, some data in the document was viewable despite the black redaction boxes, including Valve’s headcount and gross pay across various parts of the company over 18 years, and even some data about its gross margins that we weren’t able to uncover fully.
The data breaks Valve employees into four different groups: “Admin,” “Games,” “Steam,” and, starting in 2011, “Hardware.”
If you want to sift through the numbers yourself, I’ve included a full table of the data, sorted by year and category, at the end of this story.
In November 2023, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais told The Verge that he thinks “we’re firmly in the camp of being a full fledged hardware company by now.”
The small number of staff across the board seemingly explains why Valve’s product list is so limited despite its immense business as basically the de facto PC gaming platform.
While we haven’t seen any leaked profit numbers from this new headcount and payroll data, the figures give a more detailed picture of how much Valve is spending on its staff — which, given the massive popularity of Steam, is probably still just a fraction of the money the company is pulling in.
The original article contains 620 words, the summary contains 201 words. Saved 68%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
etchinghillside@reddthat.com 4 months ago
Im struggling to convince myself if I should read the article and see if some actual numbers were ever mentioned.
Seraph@fedia.io 4 months ago
Valve employee data, 2003 - 2021
Year Category [Presumably: Gross pay] [Presumably: Number of employees]
2003 Admin $454,142 5
2004 Admin $548,833 8
2005 Admin $11,644,172 9
2006 Admin $7,905,166 11
2007 Admin $1,997,107 12
2008 Admin $19,519,296 14
2009 Admin $20,300,752 18
2010 Admin $34,754,590 19
2011 Admin $35,216,732 22
2012 Admin $68,925,186 24
2013 Admin $48,462,690 20
2014 Admin $90,406,510 23
2015 Admin $91,496,697 24
2016 Admin $95,444,499 35
2017 Admin $83,146,640 38
2018 Admin $103,479,550 39
2019 Admin $109,720,296 39
2020 Admin $118,435,121 39
2021 Admin $157,999,567 35
2003 Games $3,933,064 57
2004 Games $4,471,342 61
2005 Games $18,122,549 81
2006 Games $17,260,260 97
2007 Games $12,768,984 100
2008 Games $39,677,549 136
2009 Games $44,076,164 148
2010 Games $66,201,302 173
2011 Games $68,173,834 175
2012 Games $135,484,323 186
2013 Games $107,654,658 188
2014 Games $152,351,554 185
2015 Games $181,769,451 160
2016 Games $174,660,830 175
2017 Games $221,488,403 184
2018 Games $216,249,204 192
2019 Games $236,798,782 201
2020 Games $199,306,798 189
2021 Games $192,355,985 181
2003 Steam $1,038,091 16
2004 Steam $1,113,136 16
2005 Steam $2,840,825 23
2006 Steam $3,424,485 29
2007 Steam $3,128,634 34
2008 Steam $5,053,283 40
2009 Steam $7,339,922 51
2010 Steam $17,732,609 60
2011 Steam $16,369,045 101
2012 Steam $42,966,257 127
2013 Steam $44,515,505 128
2014 Steam $52,338,579 119
2015 Steam $72,391,837 142
2016 Steam $56,390,975 125
2017 Steam $64,945,395 102
2018 Steam $70,814,165 82
2019 Steam $66,481,253 80
2020 Steam $71,752,682 82
2021 Steam $76,446,633 79
2011 Hardware $2,252,828 7
2012 Hardware $3,460,641 14
2013 Hardware $5,369,203 20
2014 Hardware $10,180,424 27
2015 Hardware $12,396,140 27
2016 Hardware $11,001,217 36
2017 Hardware $16,724,365 39
2018 Hardware $19,578,951 47
2019 Hardware $15,831,572 47
2020 Hardware $12,008,996 31
2021 Hardware $17,706,376 41conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
"Hardware,” to my surprise, has been a relatively small part of the company, with just 41 employees paid a gross of more than $17 million in 2021
That’s the only one I saw that meant anything that useful. They have ~10x that for games but no indication of number of people there.
Grimy@lemmy.world 4 months ago
336 people 30% grabbed from every game 8.56 billion in profit
ichbinjasokreativ@lemmy.world 4 months ago
The service they privide to devs and customers is worth it, but valve doesn’t even really take 30% anyway. Watch pirate software’s video on it.
erwan@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
I love Steam and I love Gabe, but the system we have that let Steam extract so much money out of the gaming industry is broken.
And that’s true for software or online services in general, and I’m saying that as someone who benefit from that system as a software engineer.
Kolanaki@yiffit.net 4 months ago
And that’s just estimated from sales on the platform. AFAIK, they have never publicly stated their actual earnings.