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

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.

Turns out? A lot. So many scads. Alinea estimates that Steam has churned out about $16.2 billion in revenue in 2025, over $4 billion of which went to Valve itself (Valve, notoriously, takes a 30% cut on Steam purchases, a number that only gets lower after your product has raked in over $10 million).

Now, let's be clear: Valve doesn't give anyone any information it doesn't have to, and Alinea hasn't shown its working as to how it arrived at these numbers. I've reached out to both companies to ask for more info, and will update if I hear back, but it's worth underlining in your mind that these are just estimates.

But with Valve prez Gabe Newell pulling in enough billions to buy not just multiple megayachts, but the whole damn yacht company, these estimates don't feel particularly buckwild.

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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