Estimates peg Valve as a capitalism fusion reactor, making such ungodly money per employee that it's no wonder Gabe Newell bought all those yachts and the whole damn yacht company

Gabe Newell in Half-Life 25th Anniversary documentary video — (Image credit: Valve)

Is there a single games company that cultivates the kind of hushed, awed whispers that Valve does? As a private company, Gabe Newell's baby doesn't have to concern itself with putting out all the information that companies with masses of shareholders have to. And yet, it pretty much props up all of PC gaming with Steam. It's a perfect recipe for theorising, rumour-mongering, hypothesising. Are they making Half-Life 3 in there? Do all their desks really have wheels? What goes on in that black box? We may never know, but we can damn well estimate.

Today's look into the crystal ball comes from research firm Alinea Analytics (via Tom's Hardware). In a post on X, the firm's head of market analysis, Rhys Elliott, posted some estimates for just how many scads of cash Valve has pulled out of Steam this year.

Steam has generated $16B+ in revenue so far this year (@alineaanalytics estimates)That's already up 5.7% from 2024's final total!Taking Valve's cuts into account (and 100% cuts of its own juggernauts CS2 and Dota 2), Valve itself has made over $4B+ this year from Steam. pic.twitter.com/PlMCjDEEgDNovember 13, 2025

As we wrote last year, even Valve employees have tried their hand at the napkin maths necessary to figure out how much money-per-head it generates. In 2018, Valve's Kristian Miller pegged its number of employees at around 350. That number has doubtlessly changed somewhat in the last seven years, but I can't imagine it's radically different—Valve has not become a <100-employee company or a 1000-employee one; we'd have heard about it if it had.

So taking that number and doing some simple division with Alinea's estimates, we arrive at a figure of about $11.4 million generated for Valve per employee from Steam alone. Which would be wild. For comparison, Apple—the on-again-off-again most valuable company on Earth—generates about $2.4 million per employee. In other words, it would mean Valve is a kind of miraculously efficient capitalism fusion reactor.

So if Alinea's numbers are even close to accurate then, well, it's no surprise Newell has all those boats. Though frankly, I do wish Valve would do us all a favour and crack open its books once in a while. Alas, I think it enjoys being a black box so much it's now started making them.

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One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.

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