Valve Makes More Money Per Employee Than Apple & Netflix Combined

Much like the latter half of 2024, when Valve was making headlines by doing next to nothing besides allowing industry insiders to fuel their hype locomotive with rumors and speculations related to Half-Life 3, the legendary developer and owner of Steam is ending the year on a high note without doing much of anything, all thanks to recent reports showing that, on a per-employee basis, Valve earns more than such giants as Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Google's Alphabet.

As revealed to PC Gamer by an anonymous Valve employee who examined court documents related to Wolfire Games' and Dark Catt Studios' ongoing antitrust lawsuit against Valve – which recently went class-action – the renowned developer stands out among its tech industry peers, raking in more money per worker with their existing IPs, multiplayer games like Dota 2 and Counter-Strike, and, most importantly of all, Steam.

Thanks to Valve's comparatively tiny staff – 336 employees as of 2021 – the studio's money-making machine outpaces major tech giants like Apple, with $476K per worker, Netflix, with $234K, Microsoft, with $143K, and Amazon, which, due to its enormous size of 1.5 million employees, makes only around $16K per worker. While Valve's exact figure wasn't disclosed, we now know that it surpasses Facebook, the runner-up in the graph shared by the insider, which makes $780K per employee – or approximately $89 per hour per worker.

As mentioned by PC Gamer, the figures listed above date back to 2018, meaning some changes in revenue have almost certainly occurred since then. At the same time, Valve's employee count was slightly higher in 2018 at 360, and Steam's daily user numbers were around 16-18 million six years ago, compared to 2024's 33-39 million, making it highly likely that the gaming giant's per-worker revenues have only increased over time. And with numerous reports hinting that Valve is working on something massive, it seems they have plenty of ways to invest all that revenue – whether it's Deadlock, Half-Life 3, or an entirely new project.