Valve: The Company Behind Steam, Half-Life and Dota 2

Valve Corporation is an American video game developer, publisher and hardware maker based in Bellevue, Washington. It created Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Portal and Dota 2, and it runs Steam, the online platform where PC players buy and play games.

Valve is in the news in 2026 for hardware. Its new Steam Machine, a gaming PC for the living room built on the Linux-based SteamOS, went on sale from 29 June 2026, adding to a range that already includes the Steam Deck handheld.

Overview and Founding

Valve was founded in August 1996 by Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, two long-serving Microsoft staff. Forbes reported that they paid for the start with their own Microsoft stock options and that Valve never took venture capital.

The company stays private and unusually flat. Its own site describes it as “boss-free since 1996” and says it brings people from many fields together to collaborate and create.

Its first game, Half-Life, came out in 1998 and sold 2.5 million copies in its first year, Forbes reported. Newell bought out Harrington after Harrington left the company in 2000.

Valve created Steam in 2003 as a way to deliver its own games over the internet. It later opened the platform to outside publishers. By 2011, Forbes reported, publishers earned a gross margin of around 70 percent selling games through Steam, against about 30 percent through retail stores.

Steam kept adding services over time. Forbes noted that Steam Cloud, launched in 2008, let players keep their games and saved data on any PC with Steam installed, and that a virtual goods market followed in 2010.

Key Milestones

• 1996: Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington found Valve.
• 1998: Half-Life is released and wins more than 50 game of the year awards.
• 2000: Newell buys out Harrington after Harrington leaves.
• 2003: Valve creates Steam to deliver games online, before app stores existed.
• 2013: Newell enters the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame.
• 2025: Valve announces a new Steam Machine and Steam Controller in November.
• 2026: The Steam Machine goes on sale from 29 June, starting at 1,049 dollars.

What It Does

Valve’s work falls into three parts: games, Steam and hardware. Its current titles include Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, Team Fortress 2, Half-Life: Alyx and Dota Underlords, alongside earlier games such as Half-Life 2, Portal 2 and Left 4 Dead 2.

Steam began as a channel for Valve’s own games and became a platform where thousands of creators and publishers sell directly to players. It supports 28 languages and more than 100 payment methods, and it offers community features such as chat, broadcasting and the Workshop for player-made content.

On the hardware side, Valve makes the Steam Deck, the Valve Index virtual reality kit, the Steam Controller and the Steam Machine. It also says it invented the VR technologies behind the HTC Vive, built with HTC.

The 2026 Steam Machine is a black cube about 160 mm on each side. Valve rates it at more than six times the power of the Steam Deck, using a six-core AMD Zen 4 processor and an AMD RDNA3 graphics chip, and sells it in 512 GB and 2 TB versions at 1,049 and 1,349 dollars, according to Ars Technica.

Valve says it tests hardware the way it tests software, through repeated prototypes and playtests shared with partners and players, and follows that work through to manufacturing.

Valve’s games are fixtures of global esports. Dota 2 is part of the Esports World Cup, as our report on Dota 2 viewership and winners at the Esports World Cup 2026 showed. Valve also runs its own Dota 2 championship, The International; it says the 2018 edition at Rogers Arena in Vancouver drew millions of concurrent viewers online.

In Numbers

• Steam users online at one moment: about 34 million (28 October 2026)
• Steam users in a game at that moment: about 9.8 million (28 October 2026)
• Staff: 336 employees (2021, company data in a court filing reported by The Verge in 2024)
• Half-Life first-year sales: 2.5 million copies (1998 to 1999, Forbes)
• Steam Machine starting price: 1,049 dollars (2026)

Leadership

• Co-founder and President: Gabe Newell