{"title":"Valve","description":"\u003cp\u003eValve Corporation was founded on August 24, 1996 in Kirkland, Washington by Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, two Microsoft veterans who had spent years shipping Windows and wanted to build games instead. Their first project, Half-Life, arrived in November 1998 on a heavily reworked Quake engine that became known as GoldSrc, and it rewrote the expectations for a first-person shooter by telling its story entirely inside the game world, with no cutscenes to pull the player out of Gordon Freeman's boots. Just as important was what the community built on top of it: Valve embraced modders from the start, and when Counter-Strike grew from a Half-Life mod by Minh Le and Jess Cliffe into the most played online shooter of its era, Valve acquired it outright in 2000 and hired its creators. Harrington left the company that same year, leaving Newell to shape a studio with a famously flat structure, no formal managers and desks on wheels, a culture the company later described openly in its handbook for new employees. Team Fortress Classic and Day of Defeat followed the same mod-to-product path, and in September 2003, the year Valve moved to Bellevue, Washington, the company launched Steam, a digital distribution platform that was initially resented as a patching system and went on to become the dominant storefront for PC gaming.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHalf-Life 2 launched in November 2004 on Valve's new Source engine, requiring Steam to activate and dragging a skeptical audience onto the platform in the process, and the same engine carried Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life 2: Episode One and the 2007 Orange Box, which bundled Episode Two with Team Fortress 2 and the puzzle game Portal. Valve acquired Turtle Rock Studios in 2008 to finish Left 4 Dead, then built Left 4 Dead 2 in-house for a November 2009 release, refining the AI Director that sets the pace of every co-op campaign. Portal 2 arrived in 2011, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was developed with Hidden Path Entertainment for 2012, and Dota 2 grew out of a Warcraft III custom map into a free-to-play sensation by 2013. Since then the company has stretched into hardware with the Steam Controller, the HTC-built Vive and its own Valve Index headset, released the VR-only Half-Life: Alyx in 2020, shipped the Steam Deck handheld in 2022 and moved Counter-Strike onto the Source 2 engine as Counter-Strike 2 in 2023, retiring Global Offensive's client in the process. Still privately owned and still headquartered in Bellevue, Valve matters to players today on two fronts at once: it runs the platform where most PC games are bought and played, and its own catalog remains some of the most replayed multiplayer and single-player work on that platform.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"left-4-dead-2-pc-download","title":"Left 4 Dead 2","description":"\u003cp class=\"lead\"\u003eLeft 4 Dead 2 drops four strangers into the Deep South at the height of the zombie apocalypse and asks one thing of them: stick together. Valve's co-operative action horror shooter carries Coach, Nick, Ellis and Rochelle through burning hotels, flooded sugar mills, backwater swamps and the streets of New Orleans, with an AI Director rewriting every run behind the scenes. It remains the standard by which four-player co-op is measured.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003eFrom Savannah to New Orleans\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe campaign takes you through the cities, swamps and cemeteries of the Deep South across five expansive campaigns. Dead Center opens in a Savannah hotel with the fire already climbing the floors below you. Dark Carnival sends the team through the abandoned Whispering Oaks amusement park, Swamp Fever wades into bayou country, Hard Rain turns a simple fuel run into a fight through a sugar mill as the storm rolls in, and The Parish ends things on a bridge out of New Orleans. Each campaign has its own look, its own finale and at least one uncommon common infected you will not meet anywhere else, from the hazmat-suited CEDA workers to the Mudmen crawling through the swamp.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eValve has kept adding to the base game since launch. The Passing and The Sacrifice arrived in 2010, the original Left 4 Dead campaigns followed, Cold Stream landed in 2012, and the community-built The Last Stand update in 2020 brought a new campaign, new melee weapons and a refreshed Survival roster. The four survivors also got new stories, new dialogue and some of the most quotable banter in the genre; Ellis will tell you about his buddy Keith whether you ask or not.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003eThe Special Infected\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe common horde is the pressure. The Special Infected are the punishment for letting your team split up. Three new ones joined the returning Hunter, Smoker, Boomer, Tank and Witch, and each is built to punish a specific bad habit.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cdl\u003e\n\u003cdt\u003eThe Charger\u003c\/dt\u003e\n\u003cdd\u003eA hulking infected with one oversized arm that barrels down corridors, scatters the team and carries one survivor off to pound them into the ground. Anyone caught needs the others to break them free, so a Charger in a tight hallway is a test of who is still paying attention.\u003c\/dd\u003e\n\u003cdt\u003eThe Spitter\u003c\/dt\u003e\n\u003cdd\u003eLobs a pool of acid that burns anyone standing in it, which turns chokepoints, closets and safe-looking corners into places you cannot stay. A well-placed spit during a Tank fight is the kind of thing that ends a campaign attempt on Expert.\u003c\/dd\u003e\n\u003cdt\u003eThe Jockey\u003c\/dt\u003e\n\u003cdd\u003eA small, cackling infected that leaps onto a survivor's back and steers them away from the group, ideally toward a Witch, a ledge or a Spitter puddle. Cheap to kill, expensive to ignore, and the single best reason to keep a friend within arm's reach.\u003c\/dd\u003e\n\u003c\/dl\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003eOver 20 New Weapons and Items\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe sequel's headline addition is melee combat, and it changes how you move through a level. More than ten melee weapons let you get close to the zombies instead of backing away from them.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cul\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe chainsaw shreds through a horde for as long as its fuel lasts, the axe and machete take heads clean off, and the katana barely slows you down mid-swing. The frying pan is exactly as satisfying as it sounds, and every hit comes with the right sound.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe firearms roster grows too, with new pistols, shotguns, submachine guns and rifles, plus the grenade launcher for when a chokepoint needs clearing quickly. Incendiary and explosive ammo packs let one survivor upgrade the whole team's next magazine.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eNew items reshape a team's survival math. The defibrillator brings a dead teammate back on the spot, adrenaline shots trade healing for speed when the finale alarm sounds, and the boomer bile jar sends a horde chasing something other than you.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ul\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003eAI Director 2.0\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe original Left 4 Dead's AI Director built enemy waves, item spawns and music around how well the team was doing. AI Director 2.0 goes further: it can procedurally change the weather you fight through, the pathways you take and the lighting and time of day, on top of tailoring the enemy population, effects and sounds to your performance. The storm in Hard Rain is the clearest example. A calm walk to the fuel becomes a near-blind crawl back through thunder, rain and a horde you can barely hear coming. A stats, rankings and awards system tracks what you did well and what got you killed, so the run you finish is genuinely yours, and the next one will not look the same.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003ch2\u003eVersus, Survival, Scavenge and the Workshop\u003c\/h2\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eCo-op campaign play is the heart of the game, but Versus is where it gets ruthless. Two teams of four alternate between survivors and Special Infected through a campaign, and playing the infected side with a coordinated team is a different game entirely. Scavenge, new to the sequel, has the survivors racing to collect gas cans for a generator while the infected team stalls them, in short rounds that suit a single evening. Survival mode drops the team into a single holdout with an endless horde and a clock, and asks how long you can last. Adjustable difficulty scales all of it from a relaxed first run to Expert, where friendly fire and every mistake count.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eSteam Workshop support and the included Source SDK tools are why the game is still busy this many years on. Community campaigns, weapon skins, survivor replacements, sound packs and full conversions install with one click, and the game supports a mix of local and online play so a full lobby is rarely far away. Valve continues to run the online services, so Versus, community servers and matchmaking are all still live.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eGrab three friends, pick a campaign and get to the safe room. The Director already knows you are coming.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Valve","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":31950708748,"sku":"PC_9219915788_DL_GL","price":9.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0875\/3268\/files\/card-left-4-dead-2-pc-linux-steam-game.jpg?v=1789569406"},{"product_id":"counter-strike-global-offensive-pc-download","title":"Counter-Strike: Global Offensive","description":"\u003cp\u003eCounter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS: GO) will expand upon the team-based action gameplay that it pioneered when it was launched 14 years ago.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCS: GO features new maps, characters, and weapons and delivers updated versions of the classic CS content (de_dust, etc.). In addition, CS: GO will introduce new gameplay modes, matchmaking, leader boards, and more.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Counter-Strike took the gaming industry by surprise when the unlikely MOD became the most played online PC action game in the world almost immediately after its release in August 1999,\" said Doug Lombardi at Valve. \"For the past 12 years, it has continued to be one of the most-played games in the world, headline competitive gaming tournaments and selling over 25 million units worldwide across the franchise. CS: GO promises to expand on CS' award-winning gameplay and deliver it to gamers on the PC as well as the next gen consoles and the Mac.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch5\u003eDetails\u003c\/h5\u003e\n\u003cdl\u003e\n\u003cdt\u003eIncludes\u003c\/dt\u003e\n\u003cdd\u003eRegion free Steam product activation key\u003c\/dd\u003e\n\u003cdt\u003eCondition\u003c\/dt\u003e\n\u003cdd\u003eNew\u003c\/dd\u003e\n\u003cdt\u003eGenre\u003c\/dt\u003e\n\u003cdd\u003eFirst-person Shooter, Tactical Shooter\u003c\/dd\u003e\n\u003cdt\u003eUPC\u003c\/dt\u003e\n\u003cdd\u003e094922417596\u003c\/dd\u003e\n\u003cdt\u003eSystem\u003c\/dt\u003e\n\u003cdd\u003ePC Digital Download\u003c\/dd\u003e\n\u003cdt\u003eRating\u003c\/dt\u003e\n\u003cdd\u003eMature (Blood, Intense Violence)\u003c\/dd\u003e\n\u003cdt\u003eSKU\u003c\/dt\u003e\n\u003cdd\u003ePC_CRSEGLOESKEY_NEW\u003c\/dd\u003e\n\u003c\/dl\u003e\n\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSystem Requirements\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eOS:\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cspan\u003e Windows® 7\/Vista\/XP\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eProcessor:\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cspan\u003e Intel® Core™ 2 Duo E6600 or AMD Phenom™ X3 8750 processor or better\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eMemory:\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cspan\u003e 2 GB RAM\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eGraphics:\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cspan\u003e Video card must be 256 MB or more and should be a DirectX 9-compatible with support for Pixel Shader 3.0\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eDirectX:\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cspan\u003e Version 9.0c\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eStorage:\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cspan\u003e 8 GB available space\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eOS:\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cspan\u003e MacOS X 10.6.6 or higher\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eProcessor:\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cspan\u003e Intel Core Duo Processor (2GHz or better)\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eMemory:\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cspan\u003e 2 GB RAM\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eGraphics:\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cspan\u003e ATI Radeon HD 2400 or better \/ NVidia 8600M or better\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eStorage:\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cspan\u003e 8 GB available space\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Valve","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":12731228127318,"sku":"PC_CRSEGLOESKEY_NEW","price":15.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0875\/3268\/products\/Counter-Strike-Global-Offensive-PC-Game-Steam-Digital-Download_772b96a4-5fda-4a0e-983f-bbf0c36afc6a.jpg?v=1536877467"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.pjsgames.com\/en-ie\/collections\/valve.oembed","provider":"PJ's Games","version":"1.0","type":"link"}