If Valve can’t do something that will push their business and the whole industry forward, they’ll just do some other thing that will.
Doing sequels after sequels will only stagnate the franchise, making Valve lose time. For that, they rely on publishers like Activision, EA, and Ubisoft among others.
Horn is pretty neat but I guess its 12 years old now
Baba is You isn’t originally a mobile game but it has a native version which is pretty excellent
To answer your question, its as others have mentioned: catching a whale is more lucrative than appealing to the average consumer. The entire micro transactions industry (which mobile gaming is built upon and makes it the most profitable portion of the gaming industry by a mile) is all about milking your customers for everything they have without them realising it. Why did we reach this point? Unregulated capitalism, probably.
I think it’s 100% that steam makes so much money on its own. Valve stopped being a game developer once steam really took off and became the behemoth it is. Valve is in the e-commerce business, period.
I loved Alyx too for what it’s worth but my expectations for the future are dim.
The reason no one is making HL3 is because no one wants to, at least not long term.
Idk if you know much about how Valve is structured as a game studio, but it’s a bit atypical. It’s not like Gabe Newell comes in and says “today everybody starts working on HL3”, projects get greenlit and then whichever employees want to work on them are free to do so, and if they decide they’re uninterested, for whatever reason, they can leave the project.
What this means, is that if a project starts to pick up steam (no pun intended) within the company, more and more people join in, and this creates a passionate team. Various Half-Life projects since Ep2 have been started, none were finished (until Alyx), not because they were decisively axed for more corporate reasons like many other games, but because for one reason or another, the devs became uninterested or burned out, and went to work on other things they actually wanted to work on.
I think at this point, the only way we’ll ever see HL3 is if a team comes up with something completely groundbreaking and is absolutely dedicated to getting it done. Apparently, there just hasn’t been that winning combo yet. I can’t blame them, because if they half assed any aspect of it, they’d never hear the end of it.
That description of how the teams are structured sounds completely made up. They’d never get a game finished if the company was actually structured that way. I’ve personally never worked for a company that would just let me project hop when I felt like it.
… But you’re right that it is often considered the cause of many of their problems: Valve’s unusual corporate structure causes its problems, report suggests
If you look at the list of games developed by Valve it kinda becomes apparent that the only reason Valve is still around (or operates in such a free-flow manner) is because Steam is so profitable. Their release of notable titles is spotty, at best:
Valve isn‘t publicly traded (AFAIK) so they don‘t have to squeeze every last penny if they don‘t want to. And Steam revenue alone can fund anything gabeN wants to do. They don‘t have any ideas for HL3 they‘re satisfied with so they don‘t make it. And I respect that a lot TBH.
My theory is that it already has been released on Steam years ago, but not as a Valve title. It has sold millions of copies in a Humble Bundle, but nobody has ever played it.
I completely agree that the switch is genuinely painful to hold on handheld mode for more than ten minutes. The controllers and buttons are too small, it’s flat, and generally not ergonomic. It’s definitely designed for child sized hands in mind and not adults. I do my best to avoid using it in handheld mode.
Meanwhile, my steam deck is a much superior design. The ergonomics are excellent, it fits my hands, the buttons are spaced apart well, and are adequately sized, and I can play for hours with no hand cramps.
However…
The switch absolutely trounces the deck on portability. The fact that it’s flat and small means that, even while in a case, it’s extremely easy to slip into a backpack and take on the go. The deck while in a case, however, is bulky and doesn’t fit in a backpack if I want to put anything else in there (like a book and my laptop).
They were each designed with different goals in mind. I hate the ergonomics of the switch, but really do appreciate how easy it is to take on the go. I love the ergonomics of the deck, but hate how cumbersome it is to take anywhere. Nintendo made the choice to sacrifice ergonomics, and valve made the choice to sacrifice portability. Unfortunately, no solution will be perfect, and I accept that.
What you are asking for is for Valve to start behaving like developers like EA and Activision, who keep milking the crap out of their franchises with one bland generic release after the other for a quick cash grab.
The fact that Gaben doesn’t force his employees to work on the game just to make money is the reason why Half-Life games are of such good quality. The employees at Valve work on what they are motivated to work on at the moment. They aren’t being given arbitrary deadlines from overhead either. This is how we got amazing games like Team Fortress 2 and the Portal games too. Both Half-Life games were major milestones in video game history by pushing the envelope. And currently, no Valve employees believe that the conditions are currently set for this to happen with a new Half-Life 3. It would never meet the hype if they tried right now and it would be a huge disappointment.
Half-Life 3 isn’t vaporware either as Valve openly admits that they are not working on it at the moment.
Just accept that great things can’t happen as often as we wished they did.
Speaking of Team Fortress 2 and Portal, I have been around to witness other attempted iterations of what TF2 could have been been, only to be abandoned by Valve because it wasn’t good enough. Then Valve finally got their vision for what the game ultimately ended up being and then suddenly everyone was motivated to work on the game. The first Portal game was also an experiment that motivated Valve employees to work on the sequel. Hopefully one day there will be a lightbulb moment in Valve and everyone will be motivated on working on Half-Life 3 and the resulting product will surely be worthy of the name. But you can’t force it to happen.
Hopefully it will happen while Gaben is still in control of Valve though because there is no telling what will happen to the company’s unique culture and philosophy after that.
While I really like the Genesis/Megadrive, and PS1, I have to say the SNES is an almost perfect console. It had everything that made the NES great, but with beautiful 16 bit graphics.
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