Valve runs its massive PC gaming ecosystem with only about 350 employees

Enlarge / Artist's conception of Valve's micro-employees hard at work inside your Steam installation. (credit: Getty Images)

As a private and generally secretive company, Valve doesn't offer much outside visibility into its inner workings. So when years' worth of data on the company's employee and aggregate payroll numbers leaked recently, we were eager to take a deep dive to see what those numbers could tell us about the operation and evolution of a company that has a hand in the majority of PC gaming transactions.