Steam has very few employees, and they are well paid.

Through documents released as part of the lawsuit, some information has emerged about the number of employees at Steam. Some information has also been mentioned about their salaries. In short: a relatively small number of people work at Steam, and they appear to be making a good living. The information has now been censored again, so a lot of it may have been published by mistake.

According to the documents, only 79 people worked at Steam in 2021. In addition, 41 people worked on Valve’s hardware team and 181 people worked on the gaming team. Another 35 employees were assigned to “management” positions.

In total, Valve would have employed only 371 people in 2021, a relatively small number for a company that makes so much money. To put that into perspective, Valve as a whole makes about $6.5 billion a year. That’s roughly the same as EA. However, EA employs 13,700 people and Valve employs less than 400.

Those working at Valve also appear to be relatively well paid, although individual amounts are not listed in the documents. Instead, total salary costs are listed for each group, so it is possible in principle that the average is somewhat skewed as some of the higher-level positions will earn significantly more than the average employee.

Regardless, Steam’s 79-employee team reportedly earned $79,446,633 in 2021, with an average of $967,000 per person. For hardware, that amounted to $431,000 per person and for games, $1 million per person. An average of $4.5 million per person went to “administrative” employees. There’s a real chance that Valve’s top bosses are here, including Gabe Newell.