Valve is 30 years old today. From developing Half-Life to spearheading the digital storefront revolution with Steam, it’s fair to say that it’s had a large hand in defining what PC gaming is today, and with the transition into hardware, I can’t see it slowing down any time soon. Where the hell is Half-Life 3, though?
1996 was a bumper year for PC gaming, looking back. We had Command and Conquer: Red Alert, Quake, and, err, Duke Nukem 3D – we also had Pilotwings and International Superstar Soccer, but they were filthy console releases, so even though I played them and loved them, they’re dead to me.
Along comes Valve. Pairing up with publisher Sierra, it got to work on Half-Life – an FPS game on PC wasn’t anything remotely new at the time, but let me tell you, after spending about two minutes in Gordon Freeman’s shoes, I knew it was something special. Even something like getting the train to work and having idle conversation with co-workers was a level of depth nothing else had really touched at the time, and that’s before things started to go south for real.
Valve isn’t just Half-Life, though. Counter-Strike, Dota, Portal, and Team Fortress 2 – these are cornerstones of PC gaming, often best-in-class versions of whatever genre Valve wants to go. It doesn’t miss, unless we’re talking about Artifact, which we generally don’t.
Then came Steam. It’s still the go-to for most gamers looking for a digital storefront, and has enjoyed enormous lasting success, with tens of millions of concurrent users online at any one moment. Its sales and discounts have become legendary and are probably the reason for most people’s unplayed backlogs to this day.
Piggybacking off the Steam supremacy, Valve turned its attention to hardware, first coming up with the Steam Deck – a portable, handheld PC, essentially – and now various things like the mini PC Steam Deck and its accompanying VR headset, the Steam Frame. None of this is especially cheap, but with many people valuing ease of use over anything else, it’s a viable strategy.
So, Valve is 30 years old today. It’s bigger than ever, and isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. Blurring the lines between console and PC, it is bringing more PC gamers into the fold, whether they know it or not. Players use their Steam Deck and Steam Machine to play Valve-developed games that they bought through Steam – not bad for a little games company started in 1996.
