An ongoing lawsuit against Valve has made some shocking revelations about the company, and Steam.
As reported by GamesIndustry.Biz, Valve is currently dealing with a class action lawsuit from Wolfire Games, on behalf of multiple other game developers. We won’t go into detail on the lawsuit itself, but Wolfire essentially alleges that Valve engages in anti-competitive practices.
A particularly striking claim in the lawsuit that Western District of Washington Judge John Coughenour wants to learn more about, is that Valve allegedly threatens developers that they will remove their games on Steam if they’re sold at a lower price on different platforms.
But in the course of the lawsuit, Valve had to furnish some documents to the courts. While a lot of the information was redacted, the public was allowed to access the information the courts received, and we found out some striking information about Valve and Steam.
Valve had 336 employees in 2021, broken down like so:
- 41 in hardware (Steam Deck)
- 79 in Steam
- 181 in game development
- 35 in administration
In 2015, there were 142 employees under Steam, so somehow that number has gone down to only 79.
To make a comparison, EA is a similar company in terms of revenue. EA makes $ 7.5 billion annually, and it’s believed that Valve makes $ 6.5 billion. EA, for all its faults, employs 13,000 people.
The employee numbers really are incredibly low, and it makes one wonder how they are compensating for the large amount of work they should be doing for their products and services. For example, in 2015 those 142 employees dealt with 2,827 new games being published on the platform. In 2021, those 79 employees were looking at 11,226 new games.
The possibilities here do not actually seem favorable to Steam. For one, they may be having work outsourced, and for whatever reason that information has been redacted from these documents. We don’t know of Valve doing any outsourcing, and subsequently, we don’t know if those systems, and their part time or temporary employees, are being treated fairly.
Another possibility is that Valve has transferred some of that work to automation. That could include generative AI, but it’s certainly also possible to make an arrangement with no AI involved. In this case, the concerns would arise if those systems are really doing enough to vette every new game coming into the platform.
The last possibility we bring up here may seem obvious, but also really irresponsible. What if the Steam team just lets things happen on their platform as is? Remember, Steam hosted The Day Before, for an unreasonably long time. The fact that Fntastic and Mytona gave their perplexing updates while having their Steam page up, suggests that there was no one at Valve checking on their developers, and acting to protect their users.
The documents also indicate that most Valve salaries had not changed, which seems reasonable enough. Most of that money is reinvested back to the company, and that’s how they can launch initiatives like Early Access and the Steam Deck.
We have a feeling Valve didn’t want this information to come up. While many gamers treat Valve and Steam like they can never be at fault, that may have allowed them to get away with things that we didn’t even realize they were doing, just because they’re too well liked.
This wasn’t the initial reason behind the class-action lawsuit against Valve, but don’t be surprised if more of their dirty laundry comes out in the future.
