Valve Corporation is a video game developer and publisher founded in 1996 by Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, two former Microsoft employees, in Kirkland, Washington. The company is now based in Bellevue, Washington, and publishes its own games through Steam, the PC storefront it launched in 2003. Valve's catalog as a publisher runs from Half-Life and Counter-Strike through Team Fortress 2, Portal, Left 4 Dead, and Dota 2, with the invite-only hero shooter Deadlock still in testing. Valve's publishing history is a strange story on its own, since the company that couldn't release its first game without Sierra ended up running the store where thousands of other publishers sell theirs.
Gabe Newell spent 13 years at Microsoft before leaving with Mike Harrington to start Valve in 1996. Their first project was Half-Life, built on a heavily modified version of id Software's Quake engine that became known as GoldSrc. Valve had no publishing operation of its own at the time, so Sierra Studios published Half-Life when it released on November 19, 1998, handling the retail boxes and getting the game onto store shelves.
Half-Life's expansions followed the same arrangement. Opposing Force in 1999 and Blue Shift in 2001 were developed by Gearbox Software and published by Sierra, with Valve overseeing the Half-Life universe rather than releasing anything itself. Harrington left Valve in 2000, which left Newell running the company, and he has been in charge ever since.
Sierra became part of Vivendi Universal, and the relationship between Valve and its publisher fell apart in the early 2000s. Valve sued Vivendi in 2002 over the distribution of its games to internet cafes, and the fight dragged on until a settlement in 2005. Valve came out of it holding control over how its games were sold digitally.
After the Vivendi split, Valve signed a retail distribution deal with Electronic Arts. That's why boxed copies of The Orange Box, Left 4 Dead, and Portal 2 carried the EA logo. EA moved the physical discs, but Valve owned the games and sold them directly on Steam, which was the part of the business that actually mattered going forward.
Steam launched on September 12, 2003, mostly as a way to push updates to Counter-Strike and other Valve multiplayer games. The turning point was Half-Life 2 on November 16, 2004, which required Steam activation even for boxed retail copies. Anyone who wanted to play the biggest PC release of that fall had to install Steam first, and a lot of players who hated the client at launch never uninstalled it.
Valve opened Steam to third-party games in 2005, and from there the storefront turned Valve into a platform holder as much as a publisher. Steam takes a 30% commission on sales, with the cut dropping to 25% after a game earns $10 million and 20% after $50 million under rules Valve introduced in 2018. That commission model is the money engine behind everything else on this page, from free-to-play updates to hardware.
I had a Steam account around 2004, I believe. I wasn't really a PC gamer at the time though, so I left it alone for years. I didn't start gaming on PC until I started streaming on Twitch. At some point my account was hacked and stolen. They bought games on my account and added their friends, and in every way that mattered, the account was theirs at that point. Luckily, when I contacted Steam Support, they were able to verify my information, and I got the account back along with all the games that were purchased under it.
Valve's publishing history has a pattern that shows up again and again. A lot of its franchises started as mods or student projects, and instead of competing with those teams, Valve hired them and published the follow-ups.
Half-Life 2 was Valve's first self-published game in the series, released through Steam in 2004 with Gordon Freeman fighting the Combine across City 17. Half-Life 2: Episode One followed in 2006 and Episode Two in 2007, and Episode Two's ending, with Eli Vance killed by a Combine Advisor in front of Alyx, sat unresolved for well over a decade. Half-Life: Alyx finally picked the story back up on March 23, 2020, as a VR game set before Half-Life 2, and its ending rewrites what happened to Eli. Valve released a 20th anniversary update for Half-Life 2 in November 2024 that folded both episodes into the base game.
Counter-Strike started in 1999 as a Half-Life mod made by Minh Le and Jess Cliffe. Valve bought the rights and hired both of them in 2000, then published Counter-Strike: Condition Zero and Counter-Strike: Source in 2004. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive came out in 2012, co-developed with Hidden Path Entertainment, and Counter-Strike 2 replaced it on September 27, 2023, moving the game to the Source 2 engine. Counter-Strike's weapon skin economy has become a business of its own, which is part of why Valve is now in court over it, covered further down.
Team Fortress began as a Quake mod from Robin Walker and John Cook, who Valve hired in 1998. Team Fortress Classic arrived in 1999, and Team Fortress 2 launched in The Orange Box on October 10, 2007, with its nine classes and the cartoon art style that still holds up. Valve made Team Fortress 2 free-to-play in 2011. Official updates have slowed to a trickle over the years, and the community has filled the gap, with the fan project Team Fortress 2 Classified releasing on Steam on January 30, 2026.
Portal came from a group of DigiPen students whose project Narbacular Drop caught Valve's attention, and Valve hired the team to build Portal for The Orange Box in 2007. Ellen McLain voiced GLaDOS, and the game's short runtime and ending song turned it into the surprise of that bundle. Portal 2 followed in April 2011, adding Stephen Merchant as Wheatley and J.K. Simmons as Cave Johnson, along with a co-op campaign starring the robots Atlas and P-body.
Left 4 Dead was developed by Turtle Rock Studios, which Valve acquired in January 2008 and renamed Valve South. Left 4 Dead released in November 2008, and Left 4 Dead 2 came out just a year later in November 2009, fast enough that an online boycott group formed over the quick sequel. Turtle Rock went independent again after the acquisition, and it later made Evolve and Back 4 Blood.
Dota 2 traces back to Defense of the Ancients, a Warcraft III mod maintained by a developer known as IceFrog, who Valve hired in 2009. Dota 2 released on July 9, 2013 as a free-to-play MOBA, and Valve's annual tournament, The International, became known for prize pools crowdfunded through in-game purchases.
Valve's smaller releases tend to get forgotten. Alien Swarm was a free top-down shooter in 2010, built by a team Valve hired from the Unreal Tournament 2004 mod of the same name. Artifact was a Dota card game designed with Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield that launched in November 2018, struggled from day one, and was eventually made free when Valve stopped development in 2021. Dota Underlords was an auto battler that fully released in 2020, and Aperture Desk Job was a short free Portal spin-off released in 2022 to show off the Steam Deck.
Deadlock is a 6v6 third-person shooter with MOBA lanes, set in an occult version of a 1920s-style New York. Valve made it public on August 23, 2024, after months of leaks, but access has stayed invite-only, with players getting in through friend invites from existing playtesters. The Steam page still lists the release date as To Be Announced.
That hasn't kept people away. Deadlock hit a record 303,347 concurrent players on Steam on October 16, 2026, after Valve added the hero Violet in its City Never Sleeps update. For an unfinished game that technically can't be bought, those are the kind of numbers that make the invite-only label feel more like a formality.
Valve has never announced Half-Life 3. Dataminers have pointed for years to a project codenamed HLX in Valve's files, and the name became the center of the latest round of Half-Life 3 speculation. In October 2026, Valve composer Mike Morasky said "HLX" out loud during a GameSoundCon panel about Valve's audio engine, which is the closest thing to an acknowledgment a Valve employee has made in public. Until Valve actually puts something on a Steam page, Episode Two's cliffhanger and the Half-Life: Alyx ending are where the story stands.
The running joke is that Valve stopped making games once Steam started printing money, and the release history gives the joke some ammunition. Valve runs on a famously flat structure with no traditional managers, a setup it described in its 2012 employee handbook, and projects only move forward when enough people choose to work on them. That's how a game like Half-Life: Alyx happens, and it's also how years pass with nothing new.
The more accurate answer is that Valve makes fewer games and supports them for a very long time. Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2 get regular updates, Deadlock gets new heroes and patches on a steady schedule, and Valve has spent a big chunk of the last few years on hardware instead.
Valve's first hardware push was the original Steam Machines in 2015, PCs built by partner manufacturers running SteamOS, along with the first Steam Controller. Neither caught on, and the original Steam Controller was discontinued in 2019. The Valve Index VR headset followed in 2019, and Valve confirmed in October 2026 that the Index is no longer being produced.
The Steam Deck changed things when it launched in February 2022. Running SteamOS with Valve's Proton compatibility layer, it let Windows games run on a Linux handheld, and it gave Valve a hit piece of hardware for the first time.
Valve announced a new Steam Machine, a new Steam Controller, and the Steam Frame VR headset in November 2025. Memory and storage shortages pushed all three back from their original early 2026 window. The Steam Controller launched on May 4, 2026 at $99, and the Steam Machine followed in late June 2026 at $1,049 for the 512GB model, with the 2TB model and Steam Controller bundle at $1,428. The Steam Frame went on sale in September 2026 at $1,059 for the 256GB kit, and some reservation holders won't get the chance to buy one until 2027.
Steam's 30% commission is at the center of several lawsuits against Valve. In the United States, Wolfire Games filed an antitrust case in 2021 that was later combined with a suit from Dark Catt Studios and granted class action status in November 2024. The court ruled on Valve's motion for summary judgment in a sealed order on March 31, 2026, and the outcome hasn't been made public. The case is still being litigated, and no trial date has been set.
In the UK, a £656 million collective action brought by Vicki Shotbolt on behalf of around 14 million Steam users was cleared to proceed by the Competition Appeal Tribunal in January 2026. The claim argues that Steam's commission pushed up prices for UK players.
Valve is also being sued by New York. In February 2026, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit claiming the loot boxes in Counter-Strike 2, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2 amount to illegal gambling. The suit points to Counter-Strike's case opening animation, which spins like a slot machine, and to skins that can be sold on the Steam Community Market and third-party sites for real money.
Valve is a privately held company and has never gone public. Gabe Newell is the company's president and majority owner, which is a big reason Valve can spend years on projects like Deadlock or the Steam Frame without answering to shareholders. It also means Valve rarely explains itself, so most of what's known about its plans comes from Steam store page updates, dataminers, and the occasional employee who says the wrong codename on stage.