Data from Alinea Analytics has painted a prosperous picture for each Valve and Sony, as each are reaping the advantages of Steam. Potentially the world’s largest online gaming storefront, Steam constantly manages to make headlines periodically. Whether or not it’s from some recent player count record or perhaps a sales record for a brand new title, or within the case of last week, recent hardware announcements, and maybe yacht-buying habits of Valve’s co-founder and president, Gabe Newell, there are any variety of topics that may bring Steam into media coverage.
All this being said about Steam, there’s a detail about its parent company, Valve, often not noted of the image, which is its staff size. With roughly 350 employees, Valve might just be considered one of the leanest and most profitable corporations on the planet. According the the newest report, it has brought in over $16.2 billion to date in 2025 and has been steadily increasing since 2015 when it reported slightly below $4 billion, and while Mr. Newell holds majority stock at just over 50% his employees enjoy generous advantages, including the remaining shares of the corporate.
Steam has generated $16B+ in revenue up to now this 12 months (@alineaanalytics estimates)
That is already up 5.7% from 2024’s final total!
Taking Valve’s cuts under consideration (and 100% cuts of its own juggernauts CS2 and Dota 2), Valve itself has revamped $4B+ this 12 months from Steam. pic.twitter.com/PlMCjDEEgD
— Rhys Elliott (@superhys) November 13, 2025
Based on other data (via Guru3D), each worker has a median salary of $46 million and around $1.3 million in compensation packages. With the sport of musical chairs routinely happening at the largest tech firms on the planet, similar to Intel, Microsoft, AMD, and Apple, it’s no wonder that we rarely hear of staffing changes at Valve, speak about until death do us part.
Sony gets a slice of the pie
Sony has been bringing its PlayStation exclusives to Steam for numerous years now, and revenue from the games has grown right into a sizeable portion. The latest report shows over $1.5 billion in total gross sales for PS Studios games. Helldivers 2 accounts for almost all, and really is greater than the subsequent three titles combined, at 12.7 million copies sold. It’s also been speculated that Sony is in a position to get a bigger slice of the revenue pie by only having to provide Steam a 20%, as an alternative of the conventional 30% rate, because of most titles exceeding the $50 million mark. This implies Sony’s take finally ends up being around $1.2 billion.
Nonetheless, Sony may have to re-examine its release strategy as Alinea Analytics notes that the novelty of PlayStation games on Steam could possibly be wearing off. From its Horizon, God of War, and Marvel’s Spider-Man games, there have been significant sales drops for every 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 possibly be a brand new story to inform between it and Sony.
“PlayStation may soon face pressure to rethink its timing and release strategy as Steam evolves from a distribution platform right into a rival platform with broader reach and fewer constraints.”
-Alinea Analytics