Valve Corporation

Valve Corporation is an American video game creation and development company based in Bellevue, Washington, USA that was founded in 1996, and has made a number of popular series such as Half-Life, Portal, Team Fortress, Counter-Strike, and Left 4 Dead.

History
Valve was originally a 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.

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. 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 January 10, 2008, Valve Corporation announced that they had acquired Turtle Rock Studios, adding the California technology company to its portfolio. On June 3, 2009, the studio officially shut down and completely merged with Valve. Turtle Rock Studios has since split from Valve and re-formed as an independent company, with Valve retaining the rights to the Left 4 Dead IP.

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 277 achievements, fifteen new maps, twenty-five new weapons and four new game modes for free.

There are currently over 1100 PC games that are available on Steam, and there are more than 34 million total users.

Steam includes a feature called "In-game" that makes it accessible from games by pressing a combination of keys, by default Shift + Tab. This also lets the player see pop-up alerts when friends connect and chat with them (by text or voice) as well as navigate websites.

Steam also has the ability to run non-Steam games, that way you can play a game that isn't on Steam, but still chat with friends on Steam.

The People
Valve has a team of over 190 people working day after day making and developing video games. Here is the Left 4 Dead team.

Gabe Newell
Born November 3, 1962, Gabe is the managing director, and co-founder of Valve Software.

Chet Faliszek
Writer of the Left 4 Dead series.

Mike Morasky
Composer of the Left 4 Dead soundtrack

Doug Lombardi
Head of marketing at Valve. He travels around advertising new games at conventions.