Valve Corporation

Valve Corporation, also known as Valve Software, is an American video game developer, publisher, hardware, and digital distribution company headquartered in Bellevue, Washington. It is the developer of the software distribution platform Steam and the game franchises Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Portal, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead, and Dota.

Valve was founded in 1996 by former Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington. Their debut game, the first-person shooter (FPS) Half-Life (1998), was a critical and commercial success that had a lasting influence on the genre. Harrington left in 2000. In 2003, Valve launched Steam, followed by Half-Life 2 (2004), the episodic sequels Half-Life 2: Episode One (2006) and Episode Two (2007), the puzzle games Portal (2007) and Portal 2 (2011), and the multiplayer games Team Fortress 2 (2007), Left 4 Dead (2008), and Dota 2 (2013).

During the 2010s, Valve released fewer games and experimented with hardware and virtual reality (VR). They entered the hardware market in 2015 with the Steam Machine, a line of gaming computers, and later released the HTC Vive and Valve Index VR headsets. In 2020, Valve released Half-Life: Alyx, their flagship VR game, and released the Steam Deck, a portable gaming system, in 2022.

Valve uses a flat organizational structure, allowing employees to choose their own projects. They develop games through playtesting and iteration, describing game design as a kind of experimental psychology. By 2012, Valve employed around 250 people and was reportedly worth over US$3 billion. Most of Valve's revenue comes from Steam, which controlled over half of the digital PC games market in 2011 and generated an estimated $3.4 billion in 2017.