The main purpose of the digital certificate is to ensure that the application belongs to the entity to which the certificate was issued. The Valve digital certificate does not guarantee that a signed application is safe to run, but rather informs the user that the software was digitally signed by Valve and verified by a trusted Certificate Authority (CA).
Valve Corporation (also known as Valve Software or simply Valve) is an American video game development and digital distribution company made famous by its highly successful and critically acclaimed first product, Half-Life. It is also well known for its social-distribution network Steam, and for developing the Source engine, which has been used in every product since its introduction in 2004.
www.valvesoftware.comAbout (from Valve at www.valvesoftware.com)
“We started with Half-Life®, the first-person, sci-fi shooter game that’s won more than 50 Game of the Year and a few 'Best Game Ever' awards. We expanded the Half-Life franchise with a sequel and Half-Life 2 Episodes 1 and 2. Then we added the horror titles Left 4 Dead® and Left 4 Dead 2, the muliplayer combat franchise Team Fortress®, the #1 online action game Counter-Strike® and the award-winning puzzlers Portal™ and Portal 2. And we’re just getting warmed up.
Steam is our direct pipeline to customers. It began as a little sleeper project—a handy tool to update Counter-Strike—and morphed pretty quickly into the world's largest online gaming platform. Steam guarantees instant access to more than 1,800 game titles and connects its 35 million active users to each other—and to us. Through Steam, fans can easily buy, play, share, modify, and build communities around Valve products as well as titles from other independent game studios. Steam is available in 237 countries and 21 different languages.
In addition to Steam, there is Source, our own state-of-the-art game engine. Its sophisticated character animation, advanced AI, real-world physics, shader-based rendering, and super extensibility have helped us create some of the most popular and good-looking games on the market for computer and consoles. We don’t like to brag, but Source is considered the most flexible, comprehensive, and powerful game development environment out there. And it’s about to get even better.”