Valve - the software giant that brings you Steam as well as the occasional game release - has fewer people working in the entire company than CD Projekt Red has working on The Witcher 4. An antitrust lawsuit brought against Valve in 2021 (via The Verge ) failed to fully redact a year-by-year payroll chart that states that, three years ago, Valve had a total of 336 employees. That suggests that Valve's headcount has stayed pretty stable for the past decade - PC Gamer notes that there were 360 employees in 2016 and 330 in 2013.
That figure is dramatically smaller than some of Valve's biggest competitors. There are 20,000 staff across Microsoft 's many studio, and just shy of that number at Ubisoft . EA boasts a little under 14,000 staff, while Sony is about 12,700 people.
At only 336 employees, the entirety of Valve is smaller than The Witcher 4 team at CDPR. There wee 407 people on that project at the end of April , and that's before you count the people working on Cyberpunk sequel Project Orion (56), the 20 people on original IP Project Hadar , and the nearly 100 developers on Shared Services (presumably including alternative PC storefront GOG). All in all, there's around 630 people working at CDPR, a company that has a far smaller day-to-day impact on the overall industry than Valve does.
What's interesting about Valve's breakdown, however, is exactly how many people work at each part of the company. There were only 79 people working directly on Steam, for instance, and that.