Valve

A studio that also runs the shop

Valve Corporation is a private American developer and platform operator working out of Bellevue, Washington. It was set up in 1996 by Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, two people who had previously worked at Microsoft, and it has stayed privately held ever since: no shares on a market, no quarterly statements, no annual report to read. Valve's own front page sums the job up as games, Steam and hardware. That mix is rare. Most studios either build titles or sell them, and this one has spent more than twenty years doing both.

Valve's first release was Half-Life in 1998, and its own account of the studio notes that the game collected a large pile of game-of-the-year awards. Steam arrived in 2003 as a way to deliver games and patches before app stores existed, and it expanded into a storefront used by thousands of publishers. Internally the company describes itself as flat: no hierarchy, no job titles, and hiring across broad fields rather than named roles, which is the arrangement it credits for letting staff move between projects.

Quick facts

Founded: 1996, by Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, both previously at Microsoft. Headquarters: Bellevue, Washington, United States. Ownership: private, with no published financial reporting. Debut title: Half-Life (1998). Storefront: Steam (2003). Games: Half-Life, Portal, Counter-Strike, Dota, Team Fortress and Left 4 Dead, among others. Hardware sold by the company today: Steam Deck, Steam Controller, Steam Machine and the Steam Frame headset. The Valve Index remains the earlier VR headset in that line.

The recent hardware calendar is short and dated. Valve announced the Steam Controller, Steam Machine and Steam Frame together on 12 November 2025. The Steam Controller went on sale on 4 May 2026. The Steam Machine opened its reservations on 22 June 2026 in four configurations. The Steam Frame launched on 14 September 2026. The Steam Deck, the handheld that began the whole hardware effort, launched on 25 February 2022 and is still sold.

What Valve's own numbers show

Steam answers the question of size with a live statistics page rather than a report. On 26 September 2026 that page listed 34,520,448 accounts online at the moment it was read, against a peak of 40,244,583 across the previous 48 hours. The same page ranks titles by players, and the top spots were occupied by Valve's own games: Counter-Strike 2 at roughly 1.2 million players and Dota 2 at about 810,000 when those counters were taken.

For a company that never publishes revenue, these counters are the nearest thing to a public benchmark. They come with a limitation worth remembering: the page shows a rolling two-day window only, so it cannot settle any argument about the largest number of people ever logged in at once. That kind of all-time figure is compiled by outside tracking services, not issued by Valve, and it should be quoted with the date and the source attached rather than treated as a fixed milestone.

The 2026 hardware line

Valve named three products in November 2025 and then went quiet on price and date. A Steam Hardware FAQ published on 4 February 2026 explained why: memory and storage shortages across the industry had moved too quickly, the company said, to promise concrete figures, while the stated goal of shipping all three within the first half of the year was kept. The controller cleared that logjam first, going on sale in May 2026, followed by the two larger devices months later.

The Steam Machine is a compact SteamOS computer meant for a television, and its first wave ran through a randomised reservation draw opened on 22 June 2026, starting at $1,049 in the United States. The Steam Frame is a wireless headset bundled with controllers, launched on 14 September 2026 at $1,059 for the 256GB model and $1,299 for 1TB. It went on sale through Steam on the day it was announced.

Does the hardware change how Valve's games are sold?

Not the games themselves. Titles still arrive on Steam as purchases or downloads, and the devices exist to widen where that library can be played. What the 2026 line changes is the number of places a single account reaches: a handheld, a box under the television, and a headset that also runs ordinary flat games. Every one of them makes the same argument, that a Steam library should follow the player rather than stay tied to one machine in one room.

Availability is the weak point. Valve held back the Steam Machine's first units behind a chance-based queue precisely because it could not build enough of them, and it told buyers that purchase invitations would be sent out gradually through the rest of the year. Hardware you cannot simply order is a softer promise than software you can download on the spot, which is why the storefront, rather than the plastic, is still the part of Valve that most players deal with.

Games

• Alien Swarm
• Aperture Desk Job
• Artifact
• Artifact Foundry
• Counter-Strike 2
• Counter-Strike Neo
• Counter-Strike Online
• Counter-Strike: Condition Zero Deleted Scenes
• Counter-Strike: Source + Garry's Mod
• Deadlock
• Dota 2
• Dota Underlords
• Half-Life
• Half-Life 1 Anthology
• Half-Life 2
• Half-Life 2: Deathmatch
• Half-Life 2: Demo
• Half-Life 2: Episode One
• Half-Life 2: Episode Three
• Half-Life 2: Episode Two
• Half-Life 2: Lost Coast
• Half-Life 2: Survivor
• Half-Life 3
• Half-Life Deathmatch: Source
• Half-Life: Alyx
• Half-Life: Decay
• Half-Life: Source
• Half-Life: Uplink
• Left 4 Dead 2
• Left 4 Dead 2 Demo
• Left 4 Dead 3
• Left 4 Dead Demo
• Portal 2
• Portal Bundle
• Portal: Still Alive
• Portal: The First Slice
• Prospero
• Source Multiplayer Pack
• Team Fortress
• Team Fortress 2
• Team Fortress 2: Brotherhood of Arms
• Team Fortress Classic
• The Lab
• The Orange Box
• Valve Complete Pack

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