Post
A private company that stopped making games to run the most powerful storefront in PC history — and somehow still ships hardware.
Founded in 1996 by ex-Microsoft engineers Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, Valve shipped Half-Life in 1998 and rewrote the FPS playbook with scripted set-pieces and physics-driven storytelling. In 2003 it launched Steam, partly to fix Counter-Strike piracy, and accidentally became the gatekeeper of PC gaming. Today Steam takes a 30% cut of an industry it owns, while Valve itself is a flat ~350-person org that ships rarely (Half-Life: Alyx, Steam Deck, Deadlock beta) and prints money in the background.
Example
Steam Deck (2022) was a hardware bet most analysts called insane — a $400 handheld PC running a custom Linux distro (SteamOS) with a Proton compatibility layer for Windows games. By 2024 it had reshaped the PC handheld market and dragged Asus, Lenovo, and MSI into building competitors.
Why it matters
Valve is the closest thing gaming has to a sovereign — it sets the platform fee, the refund policy, the discovery algorithm, the curation rules, and the tax rate for ~70% of PC game revenue. Understanding Valve is understanding the economics of PC gaming.
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