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Valve

All about Valve

Notable First-Party Games

  • Half-Life (1998)
  • Team Fortress Classic (1999) - originally a Quake mod, devs hired by Valve
  • Ricochet (2000) - nobody talks about this one
  • Counter-Strike (2000) - Half-Life mod, devs hired by Valve
  • Day of Defeat (2003) - Half-Life mod, devs hired by Valve
  • Counter-Strike: Source (2004) - Remake of Counter-Strike in Valve's proprietary Source engine
  • Half-Life 2 (2004)
  • Portal (2007) - indie devs hired by Valve
  • Team Fortress 2 (2007) - remake of Team Fortress Classic, helped Valve research and build out item drops and trading infrastructure
  • Left 4 Dead (2008) - independent devs hired by Valve, probably because it was made with the Source engine
  • Left 4 Dead 2 (2009)
  • Portal 2 (2011)
  • Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (2012) - known as CSGO, still stays in the Top 10 on https://steamcharts.com/ a decade later
  • Dota 2 (2013) - sequel to DotA, a WarCraft III mod, where the devs went to make Riot (League of Legends), Dota 2 (Valve), and Heroes of Newerth (S2 Games)
  • Artifact (2018) - a Dota 2 tarding card game which was booed by the audience when announced
  • Counter-Strike 2 (2023) - updated version of CSGO using the presumably newer Source 2 engine

(Source)

Revenue

Valve is a private and notoriously secret company, so all numbers are speculation.

2010

IHS Screen Digest's games analyst Ed Barton thinks Valve's 2010 revenues were in the "high hundreds of millions of dollars." This fits with a recent report by research firm Forecasting and Analysing Digital Entertainment (FADE) that said Valve's online videogame retailer Steam made nearly $1 billion in revenues in 2010. Analysts estimate the average revenue split is around 30-40% for Steam, the rest to the third-party game publishers that sell their titles on the platform. Given that, Steam made around $300 million to $400 million for Valve in 2010. — https://www.forbes.com/sites/oliverchiang/2011/02/15/valve-and-steam-worth-billions/?sh=270a04ac33f4

2017

Most of Valve's revenue comes from Steam, which controlled 50 to 70% of the market for downloaded PC games in 2011 and generated an estimated $3.4 billion in 2017. By 2012, Valve employed around 250 people and was reportedly worth over US$3 billion, making it the most profitable company per employee in the United States. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation

Valves generates record-breaking $4.3bn in 2017... Steam saw an increase in game sales revenue of $800 million in 2017 over the year prior, according to Sergey Galyonkin of SteamSpy. Based on Golyonkin's estimates, revenue generated from sales peaked at $4.3 billion last year, up from $3.5 billion in 2016, making it a record-breaking year for Valve. Speaking at GDC yesterday, Galyonkin revealed that around half of that $4.3 billion was generated by just 100 of the 21,000 games available on Steam. In other words, 0.5% of games accounted for 50% of sales revenue. — https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-03-23-valves-generates-record-breaking-usd4-3bn-from-sales-revenue-in-2017

$3.5B in 2016, $4.3B in 2017 — https://twitter.com/Steam_Spy/status/976942590116298752

2022

Allegedly users spent $1.1B in 2022 on keys alone (keys being required to open digital loot boxes, and only a portion of Valve's revenue) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhng7hg9chE

2023

Another calculation estimating that users spent USD $980M unboxing Counter-Strike cases (again, a portion of Valve's revenue) - https://csgocasetracker.com/blog/2023-Year-Review

Working at Valve

They promise staff the time of their lives. But from tech to Hollywood, there’s a neo-feudal culture of favouritism and fear -- The Guardian

Employee Handbook (2012)

CleanShot 2023-11-09 at 11 37 10

Valve published this which got a lot of people talking: https://archive.org/details/ValveEmployeeHandbook

No bosses. Desks have wheels so you can move your desk and work on what you want. Find out the latest news by peeing near people (not kidding). Sounds utopian, right? Then read what it's really like.

Jeri Ellsworth (hardware engineer, ?-2013)

Fired as part of Valve's "great purge" of 2013, when two thirds of the company decided that they didn't like what the other third were working on (hardware). https://www.theverge.com/2013/2/13/3985642/great-cleansing-at-valve-software

Ellsworth later talked about how the structure is "like high school": https://www.wired.co.uk/article/valve-management-jeri-ellsworth

Yanis Varoufakis (economist, 2012-2013)

They discussed the culture while working there. Nothing too spicy since they were currently employed: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/how-valve-hires-how-it-fires-and-how-much-it-pays

A much longer discussion that was originally on the Valve blog: https://libcom.org/library/why-valve-yanis-varoufakis

They were only at valve for a year, but the marketplace was probably strongly influenced by him: https://www.pcgamer.com/valves-former-economist-is-now-greeces-finance-minister/

Also read Yanis' take on cryptocurrency (2022): https://the-crypto-syllabus.com/yanis-varoufakis-on-techno-feudalism/

Unknown Former Employee (2019)

Piped up on Hacker News to talk about how Valve is stuck in a rut of survivorship bias, and that Valve is chasing microtransactions and not making games: https://www.reddit.com/r/valve/comments/bwxp6g/i_worked_at_valve_a_few_years_back_and_i_could/

Richard Geldreich

Tweets their experience without directly naming the company. A massive expose with lots of highlights.

"Working at Valve: 'A Fearless Adventure' or 'Lord of the Flies'?" (2023)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9aCwCKgkLo

What's it actually like working for Valve Corporation? Over the last few months, People Make Games has interviewed 16 current and former Valve employees about the inner workings of one of gaming's most mysterious companies. A place with no bosses (not even Gabe Newell, claims Valve), no job titles and you're free to pick the work that matters most to you. But how true is any of that, in reality?

Money Laundering

Many people have alleged that Steam is a huge money laundering platform and that Valve is aware and benefitting from it. Valve definitely made improvements and it's much harder to get money out of Steam than a decade ago.

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