History Of Valve

American video game studio Valve Software is based in Bellevue, Washington, and also develops, publishes, and distributes games digitally. Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Portal, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead, Dota, and Steam are all created by this company.

Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, both of whom had worked at Microsoft before, started Valve in 1996. They made their name with the critically and commercially successful first-person shooter (FPS) Half-Life (1998), which changed the face of the FPS genre forever.

In 2000, Harrington departed. After Valve released Steam in 2003, they released Half-Life 2 in 2004, Half-Life 2: Episode One in 2006 and Episode Two in 2007, Team Fortress 2 in 2007, Left 4 Dead in 2008, Portal in 2007 and Portal 2 in 2011, and Dota 2 in 2013, all of which are multiplayer online battle arena games.

While exploring hardware and VR in the 2010s, Valve reduced the number of games it produced. In 2015, they debuted their Steam Machine line of gaming PCs—which did not do well in sales—and followed it up with the HTC Vive and Valve Index virtual reality headsets.

Half-Life: Alyx, their premier virtual reality game, marked their comeback to the Half-Life franchise in 2020. A portable gaming device called the Steam Deck was launched by Valve in 2022.

In Valve's flat organizational structure, workers are free to choose their own projects to work on. Game designers use techniques akin to experimental psychology, such as playtesting and iteration, to create games.

There were around 250 employees at Valve in 2012, and the company was supposedly valued more over $3 billion. Steam, which produced almost $3.4 billion in 2017 and held more than 50% of the digital PC games market in 2011, is the main source of income for Valve.

Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, both of whom had worked at Microsoft before, started Valve in 1996.During his thirteen years at Microsoft, Newell developed Windows, which included the Doom version for Windows 95.

On August 24, 1996, Newell's wedding day, Harrington and Newell wanted to start a new business utilizing their combined riches.

They did so in Kirkland, Washington, which is around five miles from Microsoft's Redmond headquarters.

They created Valve, L.L.C.For a change of pace, Newell rejected any moniker that may imply "testosterone-gorged muscles and the 'extreme' of anything," going against the grain of the prevailing industry tradition.Newell and Harrington are also thinking about the names Rhino Scar, Fruitfly Ensemble, and Hollow Box.

Half-Life, a first-person shooter (FPS) with horror overtones, was Valve's first game.Access to the Quake engine from id Software facilitated development; Valve adapted this engine into their GoldSrc engine.Despite Valve's initial struggles, the company was able to secure a publishing deal with Sierra On-Line.

Upon its November 1998 debut, Half-Life became an instant hit with both critics and consumers.According to IGN in 2014, the history of the first-person shooter genre "breaks down pretty cleanly into pre-Half-Life and post-Half-Life eras" due to the impact of Half-Life on realism, scripted scenes, and integrated storytelling.

After Half-Life's initial release in 1999, Gearbox Software was tasked by Valve to create three DLCs: Opposing Force, Blue Shift, and Decay.After TF Software, creators of the hit Quake mod Team Fortress, was bought out by Valve in 1998, the developers rebuilt the mod for GoldSrc in 1999 as Team Fortress Classic.

After Valve made the GoldSrc engine's software development kit (SDK) public, a plethora of user-made modifications became possible.

They decided to make a full-fledged Counter-Strike game after acquiring the creators of a popular mod for the game.When Harrington saw that Valve was doing well, he sold his shares to Newell in the year 2000.

According to Valve's publishing deal, Sierra was given exclusive publishing rights to publish Half-Life and any future games developed by Valve.

As a negotiating tactic, Valve threatened to stop making games and instead focus on making software in 2001, when Amazon offered to form a partnership to build a digital marketplace.

Valve was able to acquire the Half-Life IP and the ability to distribute its games online after an agreement with Sierra was revised.

In 2003, Valve rebranded themselves as Valve Corporation and relocated to Bellevue, Washington. A more spacious Bellevue site was chosen for the office's 2010 relocation. Valve doubled the size of its headquarters in 2016 when it obtained a nine-story lease at the Lincoln Square building in downtown Bellevue.

Six months after Half-Life came out, Valve started developing Half-Life 2 with its own in-house engine, Source.Upon its 2004 debut, it garnered critical praise for its improved physics systems and increasing emphasis on story and characters.

Valve shifted to episodic production after Half-Life 2's five-year development cycle, with the intention of releasing shorter games more regularly. The first of three planned episodic sequels to Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, was published in 2006.

The second episode debuted in 2007, and it was produced from the student project Narbacular Drop. Other games in the series include Team Fortress 2 and Portal, which are puzzle games. After acquiring Turtle Rock Studios in January 2008, Valve rebranded the company as Valve South. While working on Valve, Turtle Rock created Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2.

The creator of the Warcraft III mod Defense of the Ancients, IceFrog, was employed by Valve in 2009.Dota 2, developed by IceFrog and launched in 2013, was a sequel unrelated to the Warcraft components.

That allowed it to outperform Google and Apple in terms of profit per employee, said Newell. Steam was the main source of income for Valve in 2011. It accounted for 50 to 70% of the market for PC games that were downloaded.

By 2011, Valve had shifted from episodic to platform-oriented development, and Steam updates became the norm for game updates in titles like Left 4 Dead 2 and Team Fortress 2.

In June 2012, Alve engaged economist Yanis Varoufakis to research their game's online economics.

In March 2015, Valve revealed the Source 2 engine, and in September of same year, they ported Dota 2 to it.

In 2016, a virtual reality headgear called the HTC Vive was introduced to the market thanks to a partnership between Valve and electronics manufacturer HTC.

In 2016, Valve launched The Lab, a compilation of virtual reality minigames, as part of their experimentation with VR games.Valve started looking at making a big VR game after seeing that fans desired a more ambitious AAA VR title.

A hybrid hero shooter and multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA), Deadlock was Valve's latest multiplayer game that started beta testing in 2024.Hopoo Games (Risk of Rain's creators) revealed in September that they had been hired by Valve.

Forbes Australia reported in December 2024 that by 2023, Valve was raking in $5 billion in yearly sales and had a healthy profit margin of 40%. Sixty percent of this income, twice what it was in 2019, came from Steam.