Valve Corporation

Valve Corporation, also known as Valve Software, is an American video game developer, publisher, 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 the 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 and had a lasting influence on the FPS 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 multiplayer games ''Team Fortress 2'' (2007) and ''Left 4 Dead'' (2008), the puzzle games ''Portal'' (2007) and ''Portal 2'' (2011) and the multiplayer online battle arena game ''Dota 2'' (2013).

In 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, which sold poorly, and released the HTC Vive and Valve Index VR headsets. They returned to the ''Half-Life'' series in 2020 with ''Half-Life: Alyx'', their flagship VR game. In 2022, Valve released the Steam Deck, a portable gaming system.

Valve uses a flat structure, whereby employees decide what to work on themselves. 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 50 to 70% of the market for downloaded PC games in 2011 and generated an estimated $3.4 billion in 2017. Provided by Wikipedia