Update, 8:50pm: In a VR community page conversation on this post, Facebook pal and veteran game designer Tadhg Kelly says my original estimate of average Valve salary is way off: "$150,000 per year per person forgets facilities, office costs, time off and social security etc etc. And Valve reportedly has a healthy bonus structure. Closer to $250,000 easily." I've updated this post and estimate accordingly — which now suggests Valve is much farther away from a profit from Alyx than I originally guessed.
We now are pretty sure Half-Life Alyx drove VR installs by about 1 million, and it's a reasonably educated guess to say the game helped sell about 180,000 units of Valve Index, the HMD it was pre-installed on. Another question that looms: Has Half-Life Alyx yet turned a profit for Valve? Putting publicly available reports and estimates together, we can make a tentative answer: Probably not yet.
Here's roughly how much Alyx has made so far:
Direct purchases of Half-Life: Alyx generated $40.7M in revenue, and hundreds of thousands of free copies of the game were also bundled with devices like the Valve Index headset to boost interest in VR.
And here's how many people Valve paid to develop Alyx:
“Right now it’s around 80 people,” the company said, “which puts it as the largest single team we’ve ever had at Valve.”
And here's how long those 80 people have been developing Alyx:
We started in February of 2016, I think, with a small team, and we brought out a small prototype. Then people started to play that, understood what we were trying to do afterward, and started joining up. We had 80 people on the team when we were about midway through.
OK so development over four years, but not 80 people total during those entire four years. Let's average it out to between 40-60 people per year.
Now time for some dirty math after a quick visit to Glassdoor:
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