Valve Corporation

Valve Corporation is an American video game development company based in Bellevue, Washington, USA that was founded in 1996, and made famous by its first product, Half-Life, which was released in November 1998.

History
Valve was originally an Limited liability company, based in Kirkland, Washington. After the company became a corporation in 2003 it moved away from its original location to Bellevue, Washington. The city of Bellevue, Washington was also where their original publisher, Sierra Entertainment, Inc., was based.

Half-Life's success was followed by developing mods, spin-offs, and sequels including Half-Life 2. Valve bases all of its games off of its Source game engine, with much of its success coming from mods and sequels. It has produced six series of games; Half-Life, Team Fortress, Portal, Counter-Strike, Left 4 Dead, and Day of Defeat. Valve is notable for being extremely supportive of their modding community, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress and Day of Defeat, all being mods that Valve purchased and developed into full games.

On 10 January 2008, Valve Corporation announced that they had acquired Turtle Rock Studios, adding the California technology company to its portfolio.

Steam
Valve announced its Steam content delivery system in 2002. At the time, it looked to be a method of streamlining the patch process common in online computer games. Steam was later revealed as a replacement for much of the framework of the World Opponent Network and Half-Life multiplayer and also as a distribution system for entire games.

Through Steam, Valve is extremely supportive of their games. They regularly release updates, and, in the case of Team Fortress 2, have added 132 achievements, ten new maps, nine new weapons and two new game modes for free.

As of October 1 2008, over 450 PC games are available on Steam, and there are approximately 15 million users.