14 DAY TRIAL // Gabe Newell, who is one of the co-founders and the current managing director at Valve, has claimed that, when taking the number of employees into account, his company is more profitable than technology stalwarts like Apple, the creators of the iPhone, and Google, the dominating force in Internet advertising and search services.
At the moment, Valve has around 250 employees and the company deals with both the development of video game and with providing digital distribution services on the PC for other publishers.
The video game line up for Valve includes Half Life, which has long been on hiatus, Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress, Counter-Strike and Portal, which will soon receive a sequel.
Steam is arguably the most used digital distribution service in the PC space, allowing gamers to buy games without the need for a physical disk, offering them community features and a lot of quite attractive sales.
Valve also creates Steamworks, a suite of publishing and post-launch support tools, that is being integrated in more high profile video game.
The suite allows support for patching and for content distribution.
Publishers are using Steam as a bulwark against piracy, which is often cited as one of the main problems of the PC as a gaming platform.
Sources outside the industry are claiming that sales for the year of 2010 for Steam have come close to 1 billion dollars, with Call of Duty: Black Ops being the best-sold game.
Valve tends to play its future cards close to its chest and has not yet said how it plans to expand Steam in the future in order to make it more attractive than competitors like Direct2Drive, Gamersgate and Impulse from Stardock.
Fans are also eagerly awaiting for the video game development part of the company to announce a new title or to say when it releases the long-awaited conclusion to the Half Life universe.