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Overview
Valve Software or Valve Corporation was founded as an L.L.C. based in Kirkland, Washington. After incorporation in 2003, it moved from its original location to Bellevue, Washington, the same city in which their original publisher, Sierra On-Line, Inc., was based.
After the success of Half-Life, the team worked on mods, spin-offs, and sequels, including Half-Life 2. All current Valve games are built on its Source 2 Engine, which owes much of its success to sequels of Half-Life 2 and the games of the Source Engine. The company has produced six games series: Half-Life, Team Fortress, Portal, Counter-Strike, Left 4 Dead, and Day of Defeat. Valve is noted for its support of its games' modding community: most prominently, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, and Day of Defeat each began as a third-party mod that Valve purchased and developed into a full game. They also distribute games and community mods on Steam.
On January 10, 2008, Valve Corporation announced the acquisition of Turtle Rock Studios.
On October 5, 2009, Defense of the Ancients (DotA) developer IceFrog announced that he would be leading a team at Valve to further develop DotA. This got released as Dota 2.
Steam
Valve announced its Steam content delivery system in 2002. At the time, it looked to be a method of streamlining the patch process common in online computer games. Steam was later revealed as a replacement for much of the framework of WON and Half-Life multiplayer and also as a distribution system for entire games. This system got released in September, 2003.
Through Steam, Valve has shown substantial support for their games through regular updates. Valve distributed many major updates for Team Fortress 2 on Steam, which added maps, game modes, additional weapons, achievements, and additional generic bug fixes. All such updates are provided free of charge. Steam also introduced the uploading screenshots online and the Workshop to have cosmetics for Team Fortress 2 stored there and can be rated by the users on Steam. However, not everything is good for Steam as games not created by Valve distributed on the platform usually have 20% or above of each sale go to Valve.
Thousands of games are available on Steam, and there are over 50 million user accounts. Steam holds a strong dominance as a digital PC game distribution as it supports Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Garry's Mod
Valve Software isn't a Garry's Mod developer (which is Garry Newman), but its publisher through Steam. Garry's Mod uses the Source Engine. According to The Steam Review, Valve has given Garry Newman, in exchange for 50% of the profits from Garry's Mod, the full Source engine source code to overcome the limitations of the free Source SDK. Through the use of Steam, Garry's Mod gets free updates and can sync config files through the cloud.