Valve Software

Valve Corporation

Lobby area of Valve's offices in Bellevue, Washington
Formerly called	Valve L.L.C. (1996–2003)
Type	Private
Industry	Video game industry Digital distribution
Founded	August 24, 1996; 20 years ago (1996-08-24) Kirkland, Washington, United States
Founders	Gabe Newell Mike Harrington
Headquarters	Bellevue, Washington, United States
Number of locations	2 offices
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Gabe Newell (President) Scott Lynch (COO)
Products	Video games: Counter-Strike series Dota 2 Day of Defeat series Half-Life series Left 4 Dead series Portal series Team Fortress series Software: GoldSrc Source Source Filmmaker Steam SteamOS Valve Anti-Cheat VOGL
Total equity	US$2.5 billion (2012)
Owner	Gabe Newell (over 50%)
Number of employees	~360 (2016)
Subsidiaries	Valve S.a.r.l. Valve GmbH
Website	www.valvesoftware.com

Valve Corporation (commonly referred to as Valve) is an American video game developer and digital distribution company headquartered in Bellevue, Washington. The company is known for the Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Portal, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead, and Dota 2 games, and its software distribution platform Steam.

Valve was founded in 1996 as a limited liability company by former Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington. Their debut product, the PC first-person shooter Half-Life, was released in 1998 to critical acclaim and commercial success, after which Harrington left the company. In 2004, Valve launched Steam alongside the critically acclaimed Half-Life 2. By 2011, over half of digital PC game sales were through Steam, and Valve was the most profitable company per employee in the United States. In 2015, Valve entered the game hardware market with the Steam Machine, a line of prebuilt gaming computers running SteamOS, a Valve-developed fork of the Debian operating system.