Valve's reported profit-per-head from Steam commissions is out there, and at $3.5 million per employee it makes Apple and Facebook look like a lemonade stand

(Image credit: Deviantart user Deniszizen)

Remember last year when leaked documents from a court case between Valve and indie dev Wolfire Games revealed that—per the calculations of its own data scientist Kristian Miller—Valve makes more money per head than Facebook, Apple, Netflix, and any other tech titan you care to name?

That was remarkable, as news days go, but there was some info missing: Miller's calculations for Valve's net income per employee was redacted, meaning we only could tell it was higher than Facebook's $780,400 net income per employee in second place (and much higher than Apple's $476,160 in third). How much bigger was uncertain.

But, as spotted by The Financial Times, one particular leaked document from the case got snatched back down before most people could notice it, one that supposedly shows Steam's commission revenues between 2009 and 2021.

Now, it's important to emphasise—as the FT does—that this document has long since been yanked offline from where it originally leaked, meaning we can only go by the word of SteamDB's Pavel Djundik and the, um, r/FuckEpic subreddit that it's not some mad fake.

So take the numbers with a grain of salt, but they're certainly believable. Per the docs, Steam's commission revenue (the juicy cut it takes from sales on its platform) climbed from a mere $100 million (ish) in 2009 to a tough-to-fathom $2 billion in 2021, where the data ends. In terms of Steam's operating profit margins (its earnings minus the expenses of running Steam and Valve more generally), that increased from 30% to just under 60%.

Purported commission revenue and gross/operating profit margins for Steam between 2009 and 2021. — (Image credit: Wolfire Games v Valve Corp, shared via Reddit)

Combine those figures and you get a 2021 operating profit of about $1.2 billion, just from Steam, in 2021 alone.

So let's do some maths. Those leaked court docs show that Valve had 336 employees in 2021. Some quick division would put the company's profit-per-head from Steam commissions alone at, um, $3.5 million.

The FT's own calculation—which just factors in the 79 employees Valve has on Steam, plus the 35 it has in "admin," yields the even more eye-watering number of $11.4 million per employee in operating profit from Steam commissions.

Again, recall that Miller's calculations in 2018 put Facebook second-place to Valve with $780k per head. That's not so much a gap as a gulf. Now, to be fair, we're comparing different things here: Facebook's numbers are from 2018 and Valve's are from 2021.

Then again, we're comparing all of Facebook against just one portion of Valve's income (Steam commissions), so if anything you'd probably expect a true comparison to look even worse for Meta and co. The fact remains that Facebook has tens of thousands of employees while Valve has a number in the low-hundreds. I doubt Zuckerberg caught up in the interim.

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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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