Valve Corporation

Valve Corporation

The lobby of Valve's former offices in Bellevue, Washington
Formerly	Valve, L.L.C. (1996–2003)
Company type	Private
Industry	Video games Digital distribution
Founded	August 24, 1996; 27 years ago (1996-08-24) in Kirkland, Washington, US
Founders	Gabe Newell Mike Harrington
Headquarters	Bellevue, Washington , US
Key people	Gabe Newell (president) Scott Lynch (COO)
Products	Video games Counter-Strike Day of Defeat Dota Half-Life Left 4 Dead Portal Team Fortress Hardware HTC Vive Steam Controller Steam Deck Steam Link Steam Machine Valve Index Software GoldSrc Proton Source Source 2 Source Filmmaker Steam SteamOS Valve Anti-Cheat VOGL
Total equity	US$10 billion[1] (2019)
Owner	Gabe Newell (>50%)[2]
Number of employees	~360[3] (2016)
Subsidiaries	Valve S.a.r.l. Valve GmbH[4] Campo Santo
ASN	32590
Website	valvesoftware.com

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.