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You can get “neglect”
Or you can get a perversion of a once good game for profit.
Modern gaming, baby.
When Gabe dies, how much do you want to bet valve is going to suddenly want to start working on half life 3? Only to produce a buggy shallow generic AAA title with micro transactions? I’m hoping I’m wrong, but I’m a little cynical about the whole gaming industry these days.
You are aware the Gabe was there when Hats and Karambits were added to TF2 and CS:GO?
Newell isn’t some saint, he’s running an obscenely profitable business. The games Valve are actually maintaining, CS2 and DOTA2, both have a lot of microtransactions. I really don’t understand why you’re making out that Valve would never add MTX until some evil corpo suit takes over after Gabe’s death.
I’m not saying it’s perfect. I’m saying it could get much much worse. That’s all. Valve is a breath of fresh air in comparison to other corporations and publishers at the moment. Steam deck, valve index, the steam platform in general.
Steam is why they don’t make games anymore.
They’re retailers now.
I was okay with hats and cosmetics in TF2. Didn’t play CS:GO, but I’d be okay with that as well. It’s just cosmetics and you can unlock every single one of them through playing or crafting. It had zero effect on the game play. When different weapons were added I found them to be refreshing and a new lease on life for the old game. It’s stupid and silly but it was fun.
CS:GO cosmetics appear to be obtained by gambling with real money.
Counter Strike?
They didn’t create CS
CS:GO, they did. As well as CS the game, but not the mod. Also people who made original CS are all employed by Valve, so they weren’t just part of the company at the time.
Even CSGO was originally made by Hidden Path. CS2 and CS:S are the only ones fully made by Valve (+community maps/skins). Regardless the series itself was not made by Valve, they hired the original mod team after it was already a popular HL1 mod.
Sure profit from the loot boxes
It’s still a private company, so if he has a worthy follower it’s not going to happen. Let’s just hope there is someone to start running valve like it’s supposed to
Gabe’s choice of successor is arguably going to be one of the most important decisions in gaming, ever. Crazy to say, but finding someone who can maintain course and propel the medium without getting greedy is likely gonna be tough. Gabe always had vision, or at least hired people who did and listened to them. Hope he makes the right call.
Half Life recently got an installment with Alyx, and just got a free remaster 25 years after release, with the whole non-VR franchise is perfectly playable for dirt cheap on any old system. Portal has received spin-offs. Team Fortress isn’t getting the attention it deserves, but is perfectly playable on modern PCs and has aged like fine wine while receiving bugfixes and new community-made, Valve-approved content every so often. Afaik Dota 2 still has an actively supported pro league. CS got an overhaul, for better or worse.
Valve is unique in that they are one of the few developers that understand that sometimes you don’t try to fix what ain’t broke-- this is why TF2 outlived Overwatch, and will almost certainly outlive Overwatch 2 as it has many other games.
Valve doesn’t hold out on releases out of intentional neglect, but are instead painfully aware of how hard it is to meet growing expectations and continue to improve on what many would already consider to be near perfection. That’s why we don’t have HL3.
HL3 would have to be a revolutionary game, one to set the expectations for games for a decade. because anything less than that would not live up to what HL1, 2 and Alyx did to the industry.
I strongly disagree.
First of all, what did Alyx do to the industry? It was higher fidelity than most other VR games at the time, but that can hardly be called revolutionary the way HL1’s environmental storytelling or HL2’s physics systems were. Very few VR games have attempted to follow in its footsteps at all, because lookin’ good is more about dev hours than it is creativity and game design. Other than convincing a few extra people to buy VR headsets, it didn’t do anything at all to the direction of the VR market. Games before and since Alyx have used much more interesting, immersive movement controls and ammo management systems.
Second, the expectations for HL3 don’t have to be All That. If it were a fun game at all, it’d sell like crazy and people would be happy. It’s Valve’s self-imposed roadblock of new games being “different” somehow that stops them from finishing anything. But even then, I’m not sure they’ve been accomplishing that. Beyond CS2 being little more than a glow-up and Artifact being… ill-received, I’ll stick to HL and beat up on Alyx a bit more–it was just fine, But what little story it had shat on the 12 year cliffhanger in the least satisfying way possible, its weapon selection was just sad, and there are a hundred smaller things I could bring up from the sound design to the repetitive puzzles that stop actual gameplay every 2 minutes. Everything from the movement to the combat was dumbed down to the point where it might be accessible for a first time VR user, but at the cost of being extremely repetitive for anyone playing through a second time (though I will grant them props for including tools for community mappers to make much more interesting encounters).
Yet people hail it as some industry changing turning point. Don’t get me wrong, for all its faults, I enjoyed playing it, but it’s not this new Valve masterpiece that so many people make it out to be. It’s just fine. And the way it’s been lauded for the last 4 years proves that “fine” is good enough for Half Life.
