Valve is an American video game developer and publisher founded in 1996 by Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington. The company is based in Bellevue, Washington. [1] Valve's first game was Half-Life , a first-person shooter released in 1998. [2] It sold over nine million retail copies. [3] [4] Alongside Half-Life's launch, Valve released development tools to enable the player community to create content and mods. [5] The company then proceeded to hire the creators of popular mods such as Counter-Strike . [1]
Valve continued their trend of developing predominantly first-person video games in the 2000s with a number of critically successful releases. In 2004, they released the highly anticipated sequel Half-Life 2 through their own digital distribution service Steam. The game sold over 10 million copies and was met with acclaim. Valve released two subsequent episodes for Half-Life 2 and later packaged those games together with the puzzle game Portal and the multiplayer shooter Team Fortress 2 in a collection known as The Orange Box . [6] By the end of 2008, combined retail sales of the Half-Life series, Counter-Strike series and The Orange Box had surpassed 32 million units. [4] Newell also projected that digital sales of Valve's games would eventually exceed retail sales as Steam continued to grow. [4] [7] In the late 2000s, Valve released two zombie-themed first-person shooters focusing on cooperative gameplay with the Left 4 Dead series. The company continued to release multiplayer games with the launches of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2 , [6] both of which have large esports communities fostered by Valve. [8] During the 2010s, Valve began focusing on supporting their established multiplayer games with regular content updates. [6] [9] [10] [11] In the late 2010s, Valve began investing in virtual reality and started to develop games and other software that make use of the technology, such as Half-Life: Alyx . [12] [13]
Valve is considered one of the most important and influential companies in the games industry. [14] The reception of their games, along with the creation of Steam, has prompted some publications to list Valve as one of the top game developers of all time and the most powerful company in PC gaming. [15] [16] [17] Newell received a BAFTA Fellowship award in 2013 for recognizing the impact Valve had left on the gaming industry in producing several successful game franchises. [5]
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Codename Gordon Original release date(s): [128] [129]
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Several games announced by Valve as being in development have since been put on hold indefinitely or cancelled.
Counter-Strike is a tactical first-person shooter game developed by Valve. It was initially developed and released as a Half-Life modification by Minh "Gooseman" Le and Jess Cliffe in 1999, before Le and Cliffe were hired and the game's intellectual property acquired. Counter-Strike was released by Valve for Microsoft Windows in November 2000, and is the first installment in the Counter-Strike series. Several remakes and ports were released on Xbox, as well as OS X and Linux.
Valve Corporation, also known as Valve Software, is an American video game developer, publisher, and digital distribution company headquartered in Bellevue, Washington. It is the developer of the software distribution platform Steam and the game franchises Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Portal, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead and Dota.
Half-Life 2 is a 2004 first-person shooter (FPS) game developed and published by Valve Corporation. It was published for Windows on Valve's digital distribution service, Steam. Like the original Half-Life (1998), Half-Life 2 combines shooting, puzzles, and storytelling, and adds features such as vehicles and physics-based gameplay. The player controls Gordon Freeman, who joins a resistance to liberate Earth from the Combine, an interplanetary alien empire.
Source is a 3D game engine developed by Valve. It debuted as the successor to GoldSrc in 2004 with the releases of Half-Life: Source, Counter-Strike: Source, and Half-Life 2. Other notable third-party games using Source include Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, Dear Esther, and The Stanley Parable. Valve released incremental updates to the engine during its lifetime. Source was succeeded in 2015 by the release of Source 2.
Steam is a video game digital distribution service and storefront managed by Valve. It was launched as a software client in September 2003 to provide game updates automatically for Valve's games and expanded to distributing third-party titles in late 2005. Steam offers various features, like game server matchmaking with Valve Anti-Cheat measures, social networking, and game streaming services. Steam client's functionality include game update automation, cloud storage for game progress, and community features such as direct messaging, in-game overlay and a virtual collectable marketplace.
Counter-Strike: Source is a tactical first-person shooter video game developed by Valve and Turtle Rock Studios. Released in October 2004 for Windows, it is a remake of Counter-Strike (2000) using the Source game engine. As in the original, Counter-Strike: Source pits a team of counter-terrorists against a team of terrorists in a series of rounds. Each round is won either by completing an objective or by eliminating all members of the enemy team. The game was initially bundled with all retail and digital copies of Half-Life 2, before being released standalone.
Counter-Strike: Condition Zero is a first-person shooter video game developed by Ritual Entertainment, Turtle Rock Studios, and Valve, and published by Sierra Entertainment and Valve. The follow-up to Counter-Strike (2000), it was released in March 2004 for Windows. Condition Zero utilizes the GoldSrc engine and has a multiplayer mode, which features updated character models, textures, maps and other graphical tweaks. It also includes two single-player campaigns; Tour of Duty and Condition Zero: Deleted Scenes.
Gabe Logan Newell, also known by his nickname Gaben, is an American businessman who is the president and co-founder of the video game company Valve Corporation.
Half-Life is a series of first-person shooter (FPS) games created by Valve. The games combine shooting combat, puzzles and storytelling.
The Orange Box is a video game compilation containing five games developed and published by Valve. Two of the games included, Half-Life 2 and its first stand-alone expansion, Episode One; had previously been released as separate products. Three new games were also included in the compilation: the second stand-alone expansion, Half-Life 2: Episode Two; the puzzle game Portal; and Team Fortress 2, the multiplayer game sequel to Team Fortress Classic. Valve also released a soundtrack containing music from the games within the compilation. A separate product entitled The Black Box was planned, which would have included only the new games, but was later canceled.
Garry's Mod is a 2006 sandbox game developed by Facepunch Studios and published by Valve. The base game mode of Garry's Mod has no set objectives and provides the player with a world in which to freely manipulate objects. Other game modes, notably Trouble in Terrorist Town and Prop Hunt, are created by other developers as mods and are installed separately, by means such as the Steam Workshop. Garry's Mod was created by Garry Newman as a mod for Valve's Source game engine and released in December 2004, before being expanded into a standalone release that was published by Valve in November 2006. Ports of the original Windows version for Mac OS X and Linux followed in September 2010 and June 2013, respectively. As of September 2021, Garry's Mod has sold more than 20 million copies. A successor, Sandbox, has been in development since 2015.
Dota 2 is a 2013 multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) video game by Valve. The game is a sequel to Defense of the Ancients (DotA), a community-created mod for Blizzard Entertainment's Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos. Dota 2 is played in matches between two teams of five players, with each team occupying and defending their own separate base on the map. Each of the ten players independently controls a character known as a hero that has unique abilities and differing styles of play. During a match, players collect experience points (XP) and items for their heroes to defeat the opposing team's heroes in player versus player (PvP) combat. A team wins by being the first to destroy the other team's Ancient, a large durable structure located in the center of each base.
GoldSrc, sometimes called the Half-Lifeengine, is a proprietary game engine developed by Valve. At its core, GoldSrc is a heavily modified version of id Software's Quake engine. It made its debut in 1998 with Half-Life and powered future games developed by or with oversight from Valve, including Half-Life's expansions, Day of Defeat and games in the Counter-Strike series.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) is a 2012 multiplayer tactical first-person shooter developed by Valve and Hidden Path Entertainment. It is the fourth game in the Counter-Strike series. Developed for over two years, Global Offensive was released for OS X, PlayStation 3, Windows, and Xbox 360 in August 2012, and for Linux in 2014. In December 2018, Valve transitioned the game to a free-to-play model, focusing on revenue from cosmetic items.
SteamOS is a Linux distribution developed by Valve. It incorporates Valve's popular namesake Steam video game storefront and is the primary operating system for the Steam Deck, Valve's portable gaming device, as well as Valve's earlier Steam Machines. SteamOS is open source with some closed source components.
Counter-Strike (CS) is a series of multiplayer tactical first-person shooter video games in which teams of terrorists battle to perpetrate an act of terror while counter-terrorists try to prevent it. The series began on Windows in 1999 with the release of the first game, Counter-Strike. It was initially released as a modification ("mod") for Half-Life that was designed by Minh "Gooseman" Le and Jess "Cliffe" Cliffe before the rights to the mod's intellectual property were acquired by Valve, the developers of Half-Life, who then turned Counter-Strike into a retail product released in 2000.
Source 2 is a video game engine developed by Valve. The engine was announced in 2015 as the successor to the original Source engine, with the first game to use it, Dota 2, being ported from Source that same year. Other Valve games such as Artifact, Dota Underlords, Half-Life: Alyx, Counter-Strike 2, and Deadlock have been produced with the engine.
Artifact is a 2018 digital collectible card game developed and published by Valve for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It focuses on online player-versus-player battles and is based on the universe of Dota 2, a multiplayer online battle arena game by Valve. Artifact was designed by Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield.
Dota is a series of strategy video games. The series began in 2003 with the release of Defense of the Ancients (DotA), a fan-developed multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) mod for the video game Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and its expansion, The Frozen Throne. The original mod features gameplay centered around two teams of up to five players who assume control of individual characters called "heroes", which must coordinate to destroy the enemy's central base structure called an "Ancient", to win the game. Ownership and development of DotA were passed on multiple times since its initial release until Valve hired the mod's lead designer IceFrog and after a legal dispute with Blizzard Entertainment, the developer of Warcraft III, brokered a deal that allowed for Valve to inherit the trademark to the Dota name.