Valve founder Gabe Newell says his company is more profitable per employee than either Apple or Google, according to a recent profile in Forbes. An analyst pegs Valve’s 2010 revenue in the “high hundreds of millions of dollars” (a privately-held company, Valve doesn’t release public financial reports).
“Valve announced last October that it was on track for its biggest year ever, with 200% year-over-year growth. Newell says that, per employee, Valve is more profitable than Google and Apple.”
Valve makes video games like Portal and Half-Life 2, but is perhaps best known to gamers for its hugely popular online game download service Steam. Valve made quite a splash with Mac gamers in 2010, finally bringing its games – and opening Steam – to Mac users. Now the company puts Mac users on equal footing with its new game releases, and encourages Steam publishing partners to do the same.
The Master of Online Mayhem [Forbes.com]
So I guess that puts the lie to the idea that you can’t make money supporting gaming on Macs.
Yes, finally!
In all fairness, Macs likely represent little more than a rounding error to their bottom line, I’m sure. The massive majority of their income is derived from PC game sales. Still, their support of the Mac platform is welcome.
No doubt true, but an interesting statistic I remember from their early reports were that the Mac versions of their games were crashing a lot less than the PC versions. A good argument for swinging that way. 🙂