Who owns Steam and what is Valve?

Short answer: Steam is owned and run by Valve Corporation, a privately held game and technology company based in Bellevue, Washington. Valve built Steam, ships its own games, and makes the Steam Deck handheld. It has no public shareholders, and co-founder Gabe Newell holds the majority stake, so there is no board of outside owners calling the shots. If you have ever bought a game on Steam, the company behind that checkout is Valve.

What Valve Corporation actually is

Valve is a game developer and platform company. It wears three hats at once.

• Storefront and platform. Steam is the largest PC game store in the world. Valve takes a cut of most sales made through it, which is where the bulk of its money comes from.
• Game studio. Valve created some of the most influential PC games ever made, from Half-Life to Portal to Dota 2. You can see the full lineup in our Valve games list.
• Hardware maker. In recent years Valve moved into physical products, most notably the Steam Deck, a handheld PC that runs your Steam library.

The company is famous for its flat structure. There are no formal managers in the traditional sense, and employees pick which projects to work on. That setup gets credited for both Valve's creative hits and its long, unpredictable release gaps.

Who founded Valve and when

Valve was founded on August 24, 1996 by Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington. Both had just left Microsoft, where they worked on early versions of Windows. They used their own money to start the studio rather than take outside investment, a decision that shaped everything about how the company operates today.

Their first game, Half-Life, shipped in 1998 and was a critical and commercial smash. Harrington left the company in the early 2000s. Newell stayed on and still runs Valve as its president. For more on him, see our profile of Gabe Newell.

Who owns Valve today

Valve is private, so there is no public cap table to point at. What is widely reported and confirmed by Newell in interviews is that he owns a majority of the company. Employees and a small number of insiders hold the rest. Valve has never sold shares to the public and has repeatedly turned down or dismissed acquisition rumors, including talk of a Microsoft buyout that Newell publicly shot down.

Because there are no outside investors demanding quarterly growth, Valve can sit on projects for years, cancel them quietly, or ship something odd like a card game with no pressure to hit a deadline. That independence is the whole point of staying private.

Where Steam fits in

Steam launched on September 12, 2003. It started as a way for Valve to patch its own multiplayer games, especially Counter-Strike, without players hunting for downloads. When Half-Life 2 arrived in 2004 and required Steam to play, the platform got its first big wave of users almost overnight. From there it grew into a store, a social network, a cloud save service, and a workshop for mods. Our Steam history page walks through the full timeline.

Today Steam is the single biggest reason Valve is worth so much. Every sale on the platform, whether it is a Valve game or a game from another studio, sends a percentage back to Valve.

What else Valve builds

Beyond the store and its games, Valve makes technology that a lot of the industry leans on.

• Game engines. Valve built the Source engine, which powered Half-Life 2, Portal, and Team Fortress 2, and later Source 2, used for Dota 2, Half-Life: Alyx, and Counter-Strike 2. Other studios have licensed and built on these engines.
• Hardware. The Steam Deck is the headline product, but Valve has also shipped VR headsets, the Valve Index among them, and earlier experiments like the Steam Controller and Steam Machines.
• SteamOS and Proton. Valve invests heavily in Linux-based gaming through SteamOS and the Proton compatibility layer, which lets Windows games run on the Steam Deck and other Linux systems.

None of these bring in the money Steam does, but they explain why Valve is described as a technology company and not just a game studio.

FAQ

Is Steam owned by Microsoft? No. Steam is owned by Valve Corporation, an independent company. Gabe Newell used to work at Microsoft before starting Valve, but the two companies are separate. Newell has publicly denied rumors that Microsoft was buying Valve.

Is Valve a public company I can invest in? No. Valve is privately held and does not trade on any stock exchange, so you cannot buy Valve shares through a normal broker. See our page on whether Valve is public for the details and the scams to avoid.

Who is the current owner of Valve? Gabe Newell, the co-founder and president, holds the majority stake. The remaining ownership sits with employees and insiders. There is no publicly disclosed shareholder list because the company is private.

Where is Valve located? Valve is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, in the Seattle area. Its offices are near where both founders worked at Microsoft.

Does Valve only make Steam? No. Valve makes games, hardware like the Steam Deck, and the Source and Source 2 game engines, in addition to running Steam. Steam is the biggest part of the business, but it is not the only part.