Valve turns thirty: Half-Life, three goes at hardware and still no Half-Life 3

On 24 August 1996 Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington registered a company called Valve. Today it turns thirty. In that time it produced Half-Life, handed the world Counter-Strike, built the storefront most PC purchases go through, and had three goes at making hardware: two that worked and one that is still up for debate.

From one game to a store you cannot walk past

The debut was loud: Half-Life in 1998. Then came Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, Portal, Left 4 Dead, Dota. It is the kind of list where every other entry is a genre or a subculture of its own.

Steam arrived in 2003 and annoyed everybody at first: a mandatory client just to launch a game you bought in a box. Today it is the largest platform on PC, with peak concurrent users past forty million. You can argue with that for a long time. You cannot get around it.

Three approaches to hardware, all different

The Steam Deck gets talked about most, but the hardware story here is longer and more interesting than one handheld.

The second Steam Machine is not a partner box but Valve hardware. Pricing only landed on 22 June 2026, and it came in above every forecast: 1,049 dollars for the 512 GB model and 1,349 for the 2 TB one. That is 1,039 and 1,359 euros, or 879 and 1,149 pounds. Bundles with the controller run 1,128 and 1,428 dollars.

The reaction was predictably sour, because that money buys a desktop of comparable power, and Valve had warned in advance that it would not sell at a loss the way console makers do. On top of that the machine went out by lottery rather than by a buy button: you had to sign up before 25 June, and you needed a Steam purchase made before 27 April to qualify.

Even so, July brought reports of 12 to 15 thousand units a week. For a thousand dollar device in the middle of a memory price crisis, that is not bad.

And Half-Life 3, the one everybody is waiting for?

Let us get the important part out of the way: there is no official Half-Life 3 announcement. Not for the anniversary, not before it. Everything that exists is rumour, and we are passing it on as rumour.

The most persistent one turned up in December 2025. Journalist Mike Straw, citing his sources, said the game would arrive alongside the Steam Machine as a launch title. The same report explained the delay: Valve supposedly could not lock the price of the machine while memory prices swung around. It also claimed the company was feeding different false dates to different journalists to work out who was leaking.

Time did not treat that version kindly. The Steam Machine got its price in June, went on sale, shipped tens of thousands of units by July, and Half-Life 3 did not turn up with it. No announcement, no Steam page, not so much as a hint from Valve.

So the company meets its thirtieth birthday exactly where it has spent the last twenty years: holding the most anticipated unannounced game in the industry. Our position is simple. Until Valve puts up a Steam page, Half-Life 3 does not exist, however many strings the dataminers pull out of the files.

Thirty years is the age at which a games company usually has nothing left but a logo and the rights to some old names. So far this one is different: the past year alone brought a new console, a new controller and a headset in the works. We are still waiting on the games, mind.