YMMV / Valve Corporation

• Awesome Music: The 2018 Summer Sale's minigame Saliens has fantastic music, on par with any main release Valve game.
• Broken Base:
  • The decision to phase out curating games on Steam. Half the base see it as an easier way to get their games onto the platform now that Valve wasn't being as pushy with what was allowed on the store. The other half see it as a way for many more trolling games to flood the platform.
  • By the late 2010s, Valve's developmental processes have become this among their fanbase. Games actually made by Valve had become rarer and rarer as time went on, and updates for their games had started to dry up significantly, unless it was something that made them a lot of money via Microtransactions. (Dota 2 and CS:GO being contentious titles among Valve fans for this very reason, and Artifact receiving significant backlash for it's blatant cash grab design.) While they're still many people who are willing to defend the company, there are also a lot of people who view modern day Valve as a shell of its former self, comparing it to modern day studios like Activision, EA, and/or Konami. While Half-Life: Alyx and Counter-Strike 2 did help quell some of the complaints, there is still a significant number of people who view the former only being made in order to push Valve's VR Index, and the latter as being comparable to Overwatch 2 being less of a sequel and more of an update.
• Cult Classic: Day of Defeat was at best a niche mod for Half-Life 1 compared to the juggernaut that was Counter-Strike, and it was a surprise when Valve purchased the rights to the game to distribute it in a retail form, and even more a shock that they then came out with a remastered Source version. It did garner a dedicated fanbase at the end of the World War Two shooter's peak of popularity, but is still the least well known of Valve's major franchises.
• Friendly Fandoms: Valve fans tend to be fans of id Software, as the significant overlap in both personnel and tech make Valve's own games feel like a progression of what iD started and the modding scenes tend to share talent as well. It's not uncommon for maps from Quake and Doom to get ported into Valve's multiplayer games. Gabe Newell himself got his start in the game industry working on the Windows 95 port of Doom, Half-Life was built on an engine heavily derived from that of Quake, and when Valve started allowing games from other big developers on Steam, id Software was one of the first to come along.
• Memetic Mutation: Has a page.
• Nightmare Fuel: Their Vanity Plates (the first which featured a man with a valve for an eye and the second which has a man with a valve on the back of his head) are considered unsettling by some due to their dark ambiance. A more recent version of the second one has the man slowly turning his head to face the camera, but never actually getting that far...
• Uncertain Audience: It was never clear who the intended audience for Steam Machines was. PC gamers weren't interested in buying what were essentially various pre-built gaming computers for the living room, while the console players had no interest in a system with a dozen different models when the Playstation 4 and Xbox One had recently launched. By 2018, Valve acknowledged poor sales and ceased to offer them for sale on the Steam Storefront, with even the unique controllers offered for it not being able to carve out enough of a niche use to last more than another year afterwards.

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