Today marks Valve’s 30th birthday. The company was founded on August 24, 1996, by Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, both Microsoft veterans. It didn’t take long for the PC gaming world to feel Valve’s influence after it rewrote the FPS genre with Half Life (1998) and pioneered an internet-connected games retail model with Steam (2003).
Valve didn’t come from nowhere, and it doesn’t have a bedroom coder story like many of the game publishers of the 8- and 16-bit eras. Both Newell and Harrington were time-served Microsoft employees, with experience spanning 13 years and 9 years at the massive software corporation, respectively. Their in-depth knowledge of OS engineering, large-scale software projects, game porting and programming, and technical ambition were a great foundation for what they would achieve with Valve.
Only two years after its formation, Valve released Half Life. This title changed FPS gaming forever with its scripted sequences, smart enemy ‘AI,’ storytelling, seamless level design, and application of physics. It broke the Doom-a-like mold that many devs had settled into, and Half Life’s influence is still felt in modern-day FPS games.
Steam is probably Valve’s greatest achievement, though, and powerful rivals are still trying and failing to replicate its success. This online games retail platform got better and better with features like automatic patching, cloud saves, communities, achievements, indie publishing, and - importantly - mod distribution.
Valve was quick to 'industrialize' its game engine and modding to appeal to gamers. The firm’s Source Engine was used by a host of successful games, and its Steam Workshop modding wasn’t just casual fun, with billion-dollar franchises beginning as Valve-supported mods. Valve’s embrace of the above helped it fight off rival online distribution platforms made by powerful and wealthy rivals, and that it prevented deep fragmentation was probably good for the PC platform as a whole.
We remember the first wave of Steam Machines, so Valve isn’t immune to strategic missteps. However, it seems to have found much greater success in the hardware realm with the introduction of the Steam Deck handheld. It clearly wants to rekindle the Steam Machine desktop dream, but the PC industry is having something of a moment right now, with the AI-pocalypse making so many key components of PCs (and consoles, and smart devices) unaffordable. However, the software support for the new hardware thrust, things like SteamOS and Proton, seems to be improving at an enviable pace, clearly worrying Microsoft's Windows and Xbox divisions. If and when we get past this difficult hardware pricing cycle, perhaps other console makers should be worried too.