Internal Valve study found the house of Steam was making more money per employee than Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft – over $780,000 per head a year

A newly unearthed and frankly staggering internal Valve study from 2018 claims the gaming giant was, at the time, generating more revenue per employee than tech giants like Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft.

Per the GameDiscoverCo newsletter (thanks, PC Gamer), new documents have been uncovered relating to a 2021 class action lawsuit filed by Wolfire Games against Valve, alleging that the latter had been conducting anti-competitive business practices, particularly with regards to the 30% commission it had been earning from the sale of games. 

It was in the discovery phase of that suit, in which both sides are able to exchange materials to support their cases, that a heavily redacted email conversation between Valve employees surfaced. In it, they casually discuss just how efficiently Valve had been operating at the time, and as it turns out, it was more efficient than just about any other company. Per hour and annually, Valve found it was making more per employee than many of the world's largest companies.

"Plot twist: again, we are an outlier," as Miller put it. 

"Fascinating perspective," wrote former Valve employee Nat Brown. "So also is revenue per employee per hour, which gives you an interesting insight on employee leverage, at least from a revenue perspective, even if fairly irrelevant from a profit, margin, or cash flow perspective."

"Breaking these numbers down as Net Income/Hour/Employee shows some interesting comparisons," wrote Valve's Kristian Miller.

The method Miller used to determine this was fairly simple. He first divided each company's annual net revenue by its amount of full-time employees, determining Valve's net income per employee (350 at the time) was more than Microsoft's $780,000, based on its ranking in the attached data tables, though how much more is redacted and unclear. Next up was Apple at $476,000, and then Netflix at almost $234,000 per employee. 

Divided up by hour, Valve also beat the next top performer, Facebook, at $89.90