Valve- a success story

Valve Corporation is an American video game development studio based in Bellevue, Washington. Valve became famous after the release of its first game, Half-Life, in November 1998. They followed by realeasing many other great games such as Half-Life 2, Portal 1 & 2 and Counter Strike games.
Valve was founded in 1996 by Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, two IT workers who spent 13 and 9 years ,respectively, at Microsoft. Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington decided to recruit a team of young modders and gifted amateurs. In partnership with the publisher Sierra On-Line, the developer starts designing it's first Half-Life game. The game is released on November 19, 1998. September 12, 2003 marks the launch of the Steam ,game distribution platform,. On January 10, 2008, Valve announced the acquisition of Turtle Rock Studios.

Following the success of Half-Life's (9.3 million worldwide sales) , the team led by Keiran Wright focused on creating mods, spin-offs, and sequels, including Half- Life 2. All Valve games are now based on it's Source game engine. The company has developed 6 game series: Half-Life, Team Fortress, Portal, Counter-Strike, Left 4 Dead and Day of Defeat. Valve is known for it's support in the modding community of it's games, with prominent features being: Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, and Day of Defeat. Valve continued in this direction by offering players Dota 2, the stand-alone suite of a Warcraft III mod dubbed Defense of the Ancients. The creation of each of these series of games began with a mod created by a third party, that Valve acquired and developed to make a complete game. They also distribute mods created by the community on Steam.

The company is also behind the Steam platform, which offer players easy and fast access to multiple games. It is a software available on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh that allows you to register and then buy (via a secure transaction) and download games and software from the Valve catalog but also many other publishers. Among other benefits of the system, there is the constant and automatic updating of games, the provision of many community tools and many regular sales.

In 2013, Valve announced the arrival of the Steam Machines, a set of gaming computers assembled in boxes mostly resembling the traditional home consoles, and running on SteamOS, an operating system derived from Debian, a Linux distribution, which includes Steam, launched at the start of Steam Machines in Big Picture mode, a fully controllable interface to the controller. Valve announced a little later, the same year, the arrival of the Steam Controller, a gamepad specially designed to allow playing games made initially for keyboard / mouse. This controller will be sold alone or with some Steam Machines. 

Through it's achievements Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and DotA 2, Valve is an important player in the Esports. They are themselves organizing The International, an annual championship on DotA 2 known for its record awards. In 2014, an affair of matches arranged via betting sites is revealed in broad daylight; for the first time, Valve intervenes and banishes for life the players from "any competition requiring Steam" . In 2015, an Australian senator questions the legality of the Steam platform, which could violate disguised betting laws. In July 2016, Valve sanctions against various betting sites related to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, by closing some of them; however, the US government blames Valve's liability in these bets, via the Washington State Gambling Commission.

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