Valve was born out of envy for Doom — on Gabe Newell's wedding day
By 1996, Gabe Newell had worked at Microsoft for 13 years and participated in the creation of the first versions of Windows. The turning point for him was Doom: according to Microsoft's internal estimates, more people used id Software's small shooter than Windows itself. And the studio achieved this almost without traditional retail — thanks to shareware, electronic distribution, and free copying of the game. Newell saw that the network was changing the ways games were developed, sold, and promoted much faster than Microsoft realized.
Fuel was added to the fire by programmer Michael Abrash, who left Microsoft to work on Quake at id Software. Before that, Mike Harrington had discussed with him the possibility of opening a game studio together, but Abrash chose John Carmack's offer. His departure showed that the market had changed so much that a small team of developers could already poach the best specialists from the world's largest software corporation.
Newell and Harrington discussed what had happened for a long time and eventually decided that they too could build an effective company under the new rules. They invested their own money in it, and on August 24, 1996, Newell entered into two long-term alliances at once: he registered Valve and married Lisa Mennet. However, only one of them lasted until the 30th anniversary. By 2019, the couple had already divorced.
The studio could have been called "Fruitfly Ensemble"
Valve's founders wanted to move away from the clichés of the nineties gaming industry, where studio names usually screamed aggression, masculinity, and extremism. Newell and Harrington considered various options: from Hollow Box and Rhino Scar to the frankly absurd Fruitfly Ensemble. In the end, they settled on the neutral Valve — largely because a valve could easily be turned into a logo. And yet, in a parallel universe, gamers could now be flocking to summer sales in a launcher from the "Fruitfly Ensemble"...
The people from Valve's logos were found on the street — no one knows their names
Valve's legendary valve intros were born from the concept "Open your mind. Open your eyes." Artist Ray Ueno was looking for expressive faces of ordinary people, but modeling agencies repeatedly sent only glossy professionals: perfect, thin, and well-groomed.
Then the agency was asked to simply go out into the streets of Seattle and photograph random passersby with a Polaroid. The large bald man for the intro with the valve in the back of his head was spotted either in a coffee shop or a bookstore. The second, with the valve in his eye, was found nearby, right on the street.
No full contracts were signed with the non-professional models, and no names were recorded. So the two most recognizable faces of Valve — one of which we mostly know from the back of his head — belong to people who one day simply went out for coffee and ended up in the history of the gaming industry. Do they even know about it?
The woman who saved Valve from "mediocrity"
Initially, the studio founders intended to make a simple "B-grade game" to test technologies and unite the team. Marketing director Monica Harrington, wife of co-founder Mike Harrington, was horrified by this plan. She conducted a business analysis and confronted Newell with the fact: after a mediocre debut, a young and unknown studio would not get a second chance.
Details of this story only surfaced in 2024-2025, but it was Monica who convinced the team to give their all and aim for the top ten games in the world. Later, she personally secured the rights to the franchise from Sierra and devised the strategy for re-releasing the Game of the Year Edition, which cemented Half-Life's status as a cult blockbuster and helped the studio avoid collapse at the start.
Instead of "mediocrity," Half-Life eventually won more than 50 "Game of the Year" awards. However, to achieve such a result, the developers had to resort to extreme measures: a few months before the original release, they took an almost finished game and threw it in the trash...
A couple of months before release, Valve scrapped the finished Half-Life and invented "The Cabal"
By the fall of 1997, Half-Life was practically ready for release, but the team had the courage to admit an unpleasant truth: it was simply not fun to play. The locations felt like a collection of isolated boxes, and the monsters behaved foolishly. Valve took a radical step — postponed the release for a year and threw almost everything they had done into the trash, keeping only the best core, which the developers themselves described as "'Die Hard' meets 'Evil Dead'."
The project was reassembled by "The Cabal" — an interdisciplinary group of programmers, level designers, a writer, and an animator. For five months, they met for six hours four days a week and eventually produced a 200-page document. It was based on three game design principles: events keep the player engaged, the world reacts to every action, and the player blames only themselves for their death.
For a young company, another year of development was a colossal financial risk, but it was this uncompromising decision that laid the DNA of Valve for decades to come. The studio showed that it was willing to throw away months of work and rewrite everything from scratch if the result did not meet its standards.
Half-Life started as Quiver, and Gordon Freeman as Ivan the Space Biker
In its early stages, Half-Life bore the working title Quiver. It referenced the secret military project Arrowhead from Stephen King's novella "The Mist," where an experiment opens a passage to a world inhabited by monstrous creatures. The name changed, but the core remained almost the same: a scientific complex, a careless experiment, an interdimensional rift, and a very bad workday.
Half-Life's protagonist also didn't come together immediately. The first prototype looked like a character from the cover of a grim nineties shooter: a stocky man with a lush beard in a bulky protective suit. Inside Valve, the model was nicknamed Ivan the Space Biker. Gradually, the beard turned into a neat goatee, and glasses appeared on his nose.
Meanwhile, writer Marc Laidlaw pushed for his version of the character's name — Dyson Poincaré — after physicist Freeman Dyson and mathematician Henri Poincaré. Gabe Newell didn't appreciate the pseudo-scientific zeal and insisted on the more understandable "Gordon Freeman." The surname, apparently, came from Dyson, but the reason for the first name Gordon remains a mystery.
The famous monorail ride happened by accident
Half-Life's intro, where Gordon Freeman rides a monorail car through the Black Mesa complex for a long time, was not originally part of the script at all. Programmer Jay Stelly simply wrote train movement code for the engine as an experiment, and the team began to wonder why this thing was even needed in the game.
Writer Marc Laidlaw saw the technical demo and suggested putting the player in the car to guide them through the scientific complex. Thus, a random experiment turned into one of the most iconic opening scenes in video game history: it introduced the player to the world without a single cutscene and also gave speedrunners a few contemplative minutes of waiting before starting a new run.
A Microsoft program almost destroyed the first game by Microsoft ex-pats
Approximately two to three months before Half-Life's release, disaster struck: Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, where Valve stored the project and all its change history, "exploded." Programmatically, of course. The database with early versions of the game and its development history was destroyed.
The team had to manually collect current files from developers' computers to piece together the final version. The Half-Life source code itself was saved, but almost all development history from 1996 disappeared forever. Valve was left with only a final "snapshot" of the project, taken about a month before release. Thus, the first game by Microsoft ex-pats almost died because of a Microsoft program.
Almost all major Valve games were born outside Valve
Even during the development of the first Half-Life, Gabe Newell realized how long and expensive it was to make games from scratch. He found a solution outside his own studio: Valve began to look for ready-made ideas among modders and students, and then hired the authors along with their projects.
Thus, in 1998, even before the release of Half-Life, the company invited the creators of the popular Team Fortress mod for Quake from Australia. In 2000, Valve acquired the amateur Counter-Strike from its creators Minh Le and Jess Cliffe, turning a fan modification into the planet's main competitive shooter. And Portal grew out of a student project by a team from DigiPen — Narbacular Drop, a puzzle game about a "princess without knees" who couldn't jump and could only move through portals. One presentation was enough for Newell to offer the entire team a job on the spot.
To combat cheaters in Counter-Strike, Valve invented "delayed bans"
Along with the explosive growth in popularity of Counter-Strike, the game was hit by a wave of cheats. In 2002, Valve launched its own anti-cheat system, VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat). Its main feature was delayed punishment: the system could detect a violation immediately, but the ban would only come several days or weeks later.
This delay greatly complicated the lives of private cheat developers. They couldn't figure out after which update their code malfunctioned and which function "exposed" the user. Cheaters, meanwhile, bought supposedly "safe" software, played with it calmly for some time, and then were all banned at once along with hundreds of other buyers.
The catastrophic launch of Steam: how everyone hated the planet's favorite launcher
Today, Steam is perceived as the natural habitat of a PC gamer, but once the launcher faced strong resistance. In September 2003, Valve launched Steam as a mandatory tool for updating Counter-Strike 1.6. The network was overwhelmed, downloads dragged on forever, and unlimited internet was a rarity back then. Part of the community refused to switch to the new version and continued to play Counter-Strike 1.5 through the old WON network until Valve shut it down in 2004.
Even more infuriating for players was the situation with Half-Life 2. Even before its release, it became known that even the disc version would require Steam installation, account creation, and an internet connection for unlocking. Players canceled pre-orders and promised to wait for a cracked copy, and a petition against linking the game to an account collected more than 26,000 signatures.
Players' fears were confirmed on November 16, 2004, the release day. The authorization servers couldn't handle the load, so some buyers simply couldn't launch the most anticipated single-player game of the year. People paid for a box of discs but found themselves in a worse position than pirates, because the cracked version didn't require Valve's permission. A wave of public anger and accusations of parasitism crashed down on the company.
A Korean intern turned the tide of a lawsuit that almost ruined Valve
Players weren't the only ones annoyed by Steam. Vivendi Universal, which inherited the retail publishing rights to Valve's games from Sierra, saw the digital platform as a direct threat to its business. In 2002, Valve itself filed a lawsuit over the illegal sale of Counter-Strike licenses to internet cafes, but the publisher responded with a legal carpet bombing: demanding the rights to Half-Life and prohibiting the distribution of Half-Life 2 via Steam. According to Newell's recollections, legal costs almost ruined both the studio and him personally, so even the sequel's release was at risk.
The turning point came during discovery. Vivendi flooded Valve with materials on the Asian market, including a huge array of correspondence in Korean, hoping to further exhaust the opponent with translation costs. But in Valve's legal department, an intern named Andrew, who was fluent in Korean, happened to be working. While sifting through the archive, he stumbled upon a letter directly discussing the destruction of key materials related to the deal with Valve "as instructed."
The discovery shocked the judge. It turned out that Vivendi had deliberately concealed and destroyed evidence, and its position in the dispute collapsed. Valve defended its intellectual property rights, regained full independence, and obtained digital distribution rights.
A German hacker stole Half-Life 2, applied for a job at Valve, and received a two-year suspended sentence
In September 2003, German hacker Axel Gembe infiltrated Valve's network and copied the source code of the unreleased Half-Life 2. The files soon appeared online, although Gembe himself claimed he only passed them to an acquaintance and did not publish anything personally. A few months later, he made a rather naive move: he wrote a letter to Gabe Newell confessing and asking... to be hired by Valve.
Newell, along with the FBI, decided to play along. He praised Gembe's skills and arranged a 40-minute phone interview, which was recorded by law enforcement. The next step was to be an in-person meeting in Seattle. Gembe suspected nothing and was about to fly to the US, but a few days before his flight, German police raided his home on an FBI tip. Thus, the most unsuccessful job interview in Valve's history ended with a two-year suspended sentence for the candidate.
Gordon Freeman's face was assembled from four Valve employees
The familiar face of Gordon Freeman from Half-Life 2 actually doesn't belong to any single person. Artist Dabih Eng photographed four Valve employees — Kelly Bailey, Greg Coomer, David Speyrer, and Eric Kirchmer — full-face and in profile, and then blended their features into one face. The head shape was borrowed from Coomer. So Gordon Freeman not only has no voice, but he also has no face of his own.
The first third-party game on Steam was actually the second
Officially, the first third-party release on Steam is considered to be Rag Doll Kung Fu by Mark Healey, future co-founder of Media Molecule. This status is still displayed on the game's page, although it was not, strictly speaking, the first third-party project in the store. As early as May 17, 2004, Valve released the free 2D side-scroller Codename: Gordon by NuClearVision studio on Steam.
However, NuClearVision later went bankrupt, and a link leading to a domain with questionable content was found in the game. Therefore, in 2008, Valve hid the Codename: Gordon page and eventually transferred the pioneering title to Rag Doll Kung Fu, which was released in October 2005. Alas, the honorary title did not make the game particularly popular: over two decades, the ragdoll fighters collected only 80 reviews.
Left 4 Dead was born from an experiment with bots and knives in Counter-Strike
While working on bots for Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, Turtle Rock employees conducted a fun experiment: a small group of players fended off a horde of 30 bots armed only with knives. Inside the studio, the prototype was codenamed Terror Strike.
The simple idea proved so engaging that full-fledged game development began in 2005 with Valve's support. In 2008, Valve acquired Turtle Rock, transformed it into Valve South, and in November, Left 4 Dead was released, effectively laying the foundation for a new subgenre of cooperative shooters.
How a simple box and a cake from a nearby bakery became symbols of Portal
In Portal's seventeenth chamber, the player was supposed to use a regular box as a shield and then carry it further. But testers mistook the section with the energy sphere for an agility challenge and left the cube behind. To prevent the player from abandoning the cube, artists made it visually unique, drew pink hearts on it, and GLaDOS constantly reminded the player about their new "companion." In the end, the idea worked even better than planned: players began to bond with the cube and no longer wanted to part with it.
Later, the developers needed to teach players how to use the incinerator before the final battle. So the Companion Cube went into the furnace, and a simple gameplay hint turned into a character whose death players tried to prevent even with bugs.
An equally amusing story lies behind the famous cake. As a visual reference, the developers chose a real Black Forest chocolate cake from the local Regent Bakery & Cafe in Redmond. GLaDOS promises it to Chell as a reward for completing the tests, and the inscriptions on the walls warn: The cake is a lie. The irony is that the cake turned out to be almost the most real thing in the entire Aperture Science complex. The lie was not the dessert, but the promise to give it.
One voice was heard in all five The Orange Box games
Ellen McLain became the only actress whose voice can be heard in all five games of The Orange Box collection. In Half-Life 2 and both episodes, she voiced the Combine announcement system, in Team Fortress 2 she became the voice of the Administrator, and in Portal she played GLaDOS and performed the final song Still Alive. Her collaboration with Valve didn't end there: McLain's screams, moans, and cries turned into the voice of the Witch from Left 4 Dead.
The first big Steam sale covered the entire store
Today, SteamDB lists over 138,000 games released on Steam. In late 2007, the entire service catalog consisted of approximately 200 titles, so the first major seasonal sale, which started before New Year's, covered the entire store in one fell swoop.
Sales helped prove that a digital copy without a disc, box, or manual could also be perceived as a good deal. At the same time, Valve established one of the main rituals of PC gaming: buy a game for a pittance, put it on a virtual shelf, and never launch it again.
Portal 2 originally had no portals
After the success of the first Portal, Valve decided that the sequel should not repeat the familiar formula. In 2008, the team began assembling a completely different game codenamed F-STOP. The portal gun, Chell, and GLaDOS disappeared from it — practically everything associated with the original.
The new version was based on the Aperture Camera mechanic. The player could photograph objects, then create copies of them elsewhere and change their size. A small box turned into a huge platform, and a desk fan into a mechanism capable of throwing a person into the air. Developers spent about five months building puzzles around this idea and seriously intended to release a sequel without a single portal.
Testers liked the mechanic, but after each demonstration, they asked the same question: when will the portals return? In the fall of 2008, Gabe Newell ordered the project to be restarted. Portals, Chell, and GLaDOS returned to the game, and F-STOP was archived for many years. Now, a similar mechanic can be tried in the early version of the fan modification Project Capture Legacy for Portal 2. Its authors plan to turn the experiment into a full-fledged mod and release it in 2028.
How Gabe Newell outmaneuvered the Left 4 Dead 2 boycott and flew to Australia
The announcement of Left 4 Dead 2 in the summer of 2009 — just eight months after the release of the first part — provoked a real rebellion. Players felt cheated: they were waiting for promised updates for the original, and instead, Valve presented what they thought was "a $50 DLC." A boycott group quickly grew on Steam, whose participants demanded that the new part be made free or at least that owners of the original receive a substantial discount.
Then Valve played an elegant combination. The studio paid for two protest organizers to visit its office and let them play a working build. They admitted that the sequel was "balanced, solidly built, and nothing like a rushed hack," and soon closed the group altogether, stating that they had received guarantees from Valve for continued support of the first part.
At this point, Australian modder Joe W-A intervened. "Why the hell haven't I been brought to Valve yet? You need to see my campaign," he wrote to Newell. "We're boycotting your campaign," Gabe replied. "So I'll have to bring you here?" — "Me and Erik," Newell clarified. The community immediately picked up on the joke and raised over $3000 for tickets in a couple of days, but Valve paid for the flight itself, and the donations were given to the Child's Play charity.
Newell and Erik Johnson did fly to Australia, met with Joe, and tried out his unfinished campaign. The mod itself remained unfinished — the author released only two of the five maps. But Joe did get into the gaming industry and later worked on Weird West, Stray Gods, and other projects.
How hats from Team Fortress 2 led Greece's future finance minister to Valve
In May 2009, the first hats appeared in Team Fortress 2, and in September 2010, Valve opened the Mann Co. virtual item store. By June 2011, the game became free-to-play, but thanks to microtransactions, its monthly revenue increased twelvefold.
After this, Valve began to consider creating a common economic system for different games. The company needed to understand how to compare the value of items from different projects and what would happen if trade between their markets went predominantly in one direction. Gabe Newell, who read the blog of Greek-Australian professor Yanis Varoufakis about the eurozone crisis, saw similarities between these virtual economies and the relationship between Germany and Greece.
Newell personally wrote to Varoufakis and offered him to become Valve's economist. Varoufakis, who didn't even play video games himself, gladly accepted, calling the opportunity to analyze an economy with access to every player's transaction — unlike incomplete and delayed government statistics — "a researcher's dream." The economist analyzed the trade of Team Fortress 2 items and other Valve digital markets until mid-2013, and in 2015, he became Greece's Minister of Finance during the height of a severe economic crisis.
Dota 2 and the mythical IceFrog: the anonymous game designer still works at Valve
In 2009, Valve hired IceFrog, the anonymous curator of DotA Allstars, who had been maintaining the Warcraft III modification since 2005. The developer said he led his own team at the company but did not specify what they were working on. The answer came a year later when Valve announced Dota 2.
IceFrog never revealed his identity. But in 2015, Valve and Blizzard sued the creators of the mobile clones Heroes Charge and DotA Legends. The defendants tried to question Valve's rights to the original mod, and the court had to reconstruct the entire chain of its authors. As a result, in a ruling dated May 16, 2017, Judge Charles Breyer officially named the developer for the first time: "Abdul Ismail, also known as IceFrog."
Apparently, IceFrog still works at Valve. In 2025, a publication announcing six new heroes for Deadlock appeared under his name. This note soon disappeared, but users managed to take screenshots. Valve did not comment on the incident.
Valve fought piracy in Russia with 450,000 cash-accepting terminals
In October 2011, Gabe Newell articulated one of the main principles of digital distribution: "Piracy is a service problem, not a price problem." Two years earlier, in an interview with the Australian program Good Game, he explained why he didn't consider pirates to be people who simply didn't want to pay. Many had expensive computers and fast internet, but why wait for an official release without translation if a pirated version was already out and available in their native language?
The main proof of this idea was the Russian market. In the gaming industry, it was considered hopelessly pirated, but Valve gradually narrowed the gap between Russian and global releases, and by 2007, it was already releasing fully localized games in Russia simultaneously with the Western release. According to Newell, the level of piracy then began to decline, and by 2011, Russia became Steam's second-largest market in continental Europe — after Germany.
That same year, to remove another barrier, Valve switched Steam to ruble pricing and allowed Steam Wallet top-ups with cash through a network of 450,000 payment terminals, as not everyone had bank cards. So the path to victory over piracy and a digital future in Russia also involved crumpled banknotes shoved into a terminal at the nearest store.
The International: a million dollars that changed esports
By the summer of 2011, Valve had already announced Dota 2 but continued to keep the game hidden from the public. Instead of a regular presentation, the company invited sixteen of the strongest teams from the original DotA to Gamescom and organized The International. The first public introduction to the game began immediately with a championship, which had a prize pool of $1.6 million.
The prize money level was unprecedented. The first season of the League of Legends championship, held two months earlier, awarded about $100,000, and the largest StarCraft II competitions less than $200,000. Valve immediately showed potential players the ready future of the new discipline: here's the game, here are the best teams in the world, here's a million dollars — go for it.
In 2013, the company involved viewers themselves in financing the tournament by releasing a "Compendium" with predictions, rewards, and materials about the competition. A quarter of the revenue from its sales went to the prize pool, which began to grow from tournament to tournament: $2.9 million in 2013, almost $11 million in 2014, more than $20 million in 2016, and $34 million in 2019. The peak was TI10 in 2021 with a record fund of $40 million, of which the winning Team Spirit received $18.2 million. This result has not yet been surpassed by any single esports tournament.
And on the eve of Valve's 30th anniversary, Team Spirit set another record — becoming the first in history to win The International three times, triumphing at the 15th tournament in the series in Shanghai.
Jokes about Half-Life 3 made Steam entry for developers paid
When Valve launched Steam Greenlight in 2012, the service was flooded with fakes and spam, including hundreds of joke applications with "announcements" of Half-Life 3. To filter out the junk, Valve introduced a one-time fee of $100, sending all collected money to the Child's Play charity. In 2017, the system was replaced by Steam Direct, but the fee remained — now it must be paid for publishing each game, and the amount is reimbursed as soon as the project's revenue reaches $1000.
"Desks on wheels" and the dark side of Valve's flat structure
In 2012, Valve's Employee Handbook, a guide for newcomers, leaked online, creating an image of an absolute corporate utopia. It described a company without managers or subordinates: each specialist independently chose a project, and desks were equipped with wheels so that a workstation could literally be rolled to another team. According to Valve's vision, talented people were supposed to self-organize and find tasks where they could bring the most benefit.
This model worked perfectly for supporting and continuously developing service games like Dota 2 and Counter-Strike, but it started to falter on large projects that required years of work from a cohesive team. When the pioneers' enthusiasm waned and the project entered a routine phase, nothing prevented a developer from unplugging and rolling their desk to a new, exciting prototype. As a result, some projects stalled for years, while others never made it out of the experimental stage.
However, this freedom had another downside — annual peer reviews. Employees ranked colleagues, and their position in the overall rating directly affected the size of their compensation. After being fired, engineer Jeri Ellsworth called Valve a "pseudo-flat" company with a hidden layer of influential veterans and compared it to high school: there are no formal bosses, but there are "popular kids" who can promote or block someone else's initiative.
Valve truly had to rethink this approach during the creation of Half-Life: Alyx. Project co-lead Robin Walker admitted: the ability to work on whatever you want doesn't inherently make people happier or guarantee results. To release a story-driven game for the first time in a decade, Valve had to deviate from its own principles and unite most of the studio around a single goal. Before that, desks on wheels too often rolled away, leaving behind a graveyard of magnificent unfinished prototypes.
Steam Deck grew out of Valve's fear of Windows 8 — and forced Gabe to work as a courier
The history of Steam Machines began with Valve's fear of Windows 8. In 2012, Gabe Newell called Microsoft's new operating system a "catastrophe for all PC market participants" and feared that the open platform would gradually turn into a closed ecosystem with its own store. Linux was supposed to be a fallback that would free Steam from complete dependence on Microsoft.
In 2015, Valve tried to bring PC gaming to the living room with Steam Machines — computers from various manufacturers running SteamOS. The experiment failed: the devices differed in characteristics and price, the operating system was raw, and a significant part of the Steam library did not work on Linux.
However, Valve did not abandon the idea and continued to invest in Linux. In 2018, the company introduced Proton — a Wine-based compatibility layer created with the participation of CodeWeavers. It allowed thousands of Windows games to run on Linux and became the technological foundation of Steam Deck. What didn't work with Steam Machines, Valve packaged into a single portable device several years later, where it controlled both the hardware and the operating system.
Newell personally delivered several of the first Steam Decks in the Bellevue area to customers and signed the boxes. On the way, he recalled that he started his career as a newspaper delivery boy. Decades later, the billionaire worked as a courier again — only this time he was delivering not newspapers, but portable Steam libraries.
Valve never learned to count to three
After the release of Half-Life 2: Episode Two in 2007, Gordon Freeman's story ended on a cliffhanger. The continuation was supposed to follow in Episode Three, but the team never found an idea that seemed worthy of a separate game. Developers experimented with an ice gun that allowed freezing surfaces, and an amorphous creature called Blob, capable of changing shape and adapting to the environment, but then switched to the first Left 4 Dead and never returned to the episode. Gabe Newell later called this his own failure and admitted that Valve had no good reason to abandon the story.
Several years later, the studio began prototyping a full-fledged Half-Life 3. Around 2013–2014, the team experimented with procedural level generation, interspersed with manually created story episodes. Simultaneously, Left 4 Dead 3 was being developed with an open world in a Moroccan setting and hundreds of zombies on screen. Both games ran into the unfinished Source 2: the engine did not yet allow quickly assembling projects of such scale, and both projects remained in the experimental stage.
Even when Valve finally decided to return to the "half-life" universe 13 years later, the company's principles remained unchanged. In 2020, the studio released Half-Life: Alyx — a massive VR project that gave the series the technological leap that developers had lacked before. The game proved that the company still knows how to make outstanding single-player adventures. However, instead of the coveted three, Valve again settled for a subtitle, and Alyx's ending even rewrote the ending of Episode Two, giving fans another hope for a full continuation.
Thus was born the main meme of the gaming industry — about Valve's inability to count to three. Half-Life 2, Portal 2, Dota 2, Counter-Strike 2, Left 4 Dead 2, and Team Fortress 2 show that Valve has perfectly mastered the number "two," but "three" still exists only in leaks, canceled prototypes, and fan fantasies.
42 million users and $16 million revenue per employee
On March 29, 2026, 42,686,616 people were simultaneously on Steam — a new platform record. This is the population of an entire country gathered in one service. But even more surprising is that behind the largest gaming platform stands a company with an unusually small staff.
Valve is a private company, so there is no accurate public data on its staff and finances. But some things are known. For example, thanks to Valve's lawsuit with developer Wolfire Games, it was revealed that in 2021, the company had only 336 employees, of whom 79 were directly related to Steam. At the same time, the company spent about $445 million on personnel — an average of $1.3 million per employee. It seems that the famous desks on wheels are not cheap for Valve — fortunately, the company can well afford it.
According to GameDiscoverCo's calculations, in 2025, Valve's Steam-related revenue, excluding hardware sales, amounted to about $5.5 billion. If this estimate is compared with the last known staff size, it comes out to more than $16 million in revenue per employee.
Even for the world's largest corporations, this is an exorbitant figure. For example, pharmaceutical distributor McKesson, the global leader among large public companies in this indicator, had about $8 million in revenue per employee in fiscal year 2025. Apple had about $2.5 million. In other words, one Valve employee generates roughly as much revenue as two McKesson employees or six to seven Apple employees.
The secret, of course, is not that every Valve employee works for seven. Over 30 years, the company has transformed Steam from a program for updating its own games into a huge economy, a significant part of which is supported by its participants themselves. Developers bring thousands of games to the store, users create content and trade virtual items, and Valve provides the infrastructure for all of this and receives a commission from sales.
This is Valve's main achievement over 30 years. Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Dota 2, Steam Deck, and other projects defined different periods of its history, but the most valuable result was the ecosystem that the company built around them and continues to develop.
Happy anniversary, Valve! You've learned to count to 30. Now you just need to remember how to count to three.