Valve Corporation

Valve Corporation is an American company headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, that develops and publishes video games, builds gaming hardware and runs a digital distribution service. It was founded in 1996 by two former Microsoft employees, Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, and its first game, Half-Life (1998), shaped the first-person shooter genre. Valve is best known for franchises such as Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Portal, Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead and Dota, and for Steam, the storefront and delivery platform it launched in 2003, which became the dominant way PC games are sold and updated. In the 2010s and 2020s the company moved into hardware, with the Steam Machine, the Valve Index virtual reality headset and the Steam Deck handheld. For media history its importance lies in Steam, which changed how interactive entertainment is distributed, and in a flat internal structure where employees choose their own projects.