Data from Alinea Analytics has painted a prosperous picture for both Valve and Sony, as both are reaping the benefits of Steam. Potentially the world’s largest online gaming storefront, Steam continuously manages to make headlines periodically. Whether it be from some new player count record or perhaps a sales record for a new title, or in the case of last week, new hardware announcements, and perhaps yacht-buying habits of Valve’s co-founder and president, Gabe Newell, there are any number of topics that can bring Steam into media coverage.
All this being said about Steam, there’s a detail about its parent company, Valve, often left out of the picture, which is its staff size. With approximately 350 employees, Valve might just be one of the leanest and most profitable companies on the planet. According the the latest report, it has brought in over $16.2 billion thus far in 2025 and has been steadily increasing since 2015 when it reported just under $4 billion, and while Mr. Newell holds majority stock at just over 50% his employees enjoy generous benefits, including the remaining shares of the company.
Steam has generated $16B+ in revenue so far this year (@alineaanalytics estimates)
— Rhys Elliott (@superhys) November 13, 2025
That's already up 5.7% from 2024's final total!
Taking Valve's cuts into account (and 100% cuts of its own juggernauts CS2 and Dota 2), Valve itself has made over $4B+ this year from Steam. pic.twitter.com/PlMCjDEEgD
According to other data (via Guru3D), each employee has an average salary of $46 million and around $1.3 million in compensation packages. With the game of musical chairs routinely taking place at the biggest tech firms on the planet, such as Intel, Microsoft, AMD, and Apple, it’s no wonder that we rarely hear of staffing changes at Valve, talk about until death do us part.
Sony gets a slice of the pie
Sony has been bringing its PlayStation exclusives to Steam for a number of years now, and revenue from the games has grown into a sizeable portion. The latest report shows over $1.5 billion in total gross sales for PS Studios games. Helldivers 2 accounts for the majority, and actually is more than the next three titles combined, at 12.7 million copies sold. It’s also been speculated that Sony is able to get a larger slice of the revenue pie by only having to give Steam a 20%, instead of the normal 30% rate, due to most titles exceeding the $50 million mark. This means Sony’s take ends up being around $1.2 billion.
However, Sony may need to re-examine its release strategy as Alinea Analytics notes that the novelty of PlayStation games on Steam could be wearing off. From its Horizon, God of War, and Marvel’s Spider-Man games, there were significant sales drops for each franchise’s sequels. It’s also mentioned that if Steam moves from just being a digital distribution platform to a competing hardware rival, there could be a new story to tell between it and Sony.
“PlayStation may soon face pressure to rethink its timing and release strategy as Steam evolves from a distribution platform into a rival platform with broader reach and fewer constraints.”
-Alinea Analytics