What happened?

>many of the old devs and writers left
>if you make the game and its less than great people will screech at you and you will gain bad publicity
>not making HL3 spawned thousands of memes that made people talk about your games
>you don't have to make games because whales constantly give you it anyway

Success

It's run by a guy who doesn't give a fuck about games, he just wants to make lots and lots of money. If he just wanted to be rich it'd be fine but gabe is the type of guy for which it's never enough.

they can literally print money why would they bother to make games?

Gabe doesn't even work their anymore
He's soft retired

Reminder that fatass Gabe was only the money collector for half life. The true talent was Erik Wolpaw and Marc.

People playing dumbshit games like CS:GO, Dota 2, and Artifact

Steam took off.

>Artifact
Lol no.

I have enormous respect for Gaben because as far as i can tell he seems to be a pretty hardcore libertarian type. In the contemporary social climate it feels pretty important that there is an outlet for games / art that wont capitulate to outrage. If certain offensive ideas are not permitted to exist you just have an endless erosion of expression down to the lowest most inoffensive common denominator.

However it feels pretty obvious at this point that the libertarian flat heirarchy experiment that Valve engaged with has failed. I've heard that the actual dev side of things devolves into a crab bucket with insane social politics and anyone trying to do things eventually being sabotaged and capitulating to social lunatics who game the system. There is no consequence to failing for Valve devs nor is there any particular return on success so the whole department just seems to stagnate.

If Gaben just wanted to make money he could've been significantly more predatory ironically they're somewhat in this position because of their passivity. A closed system like Blizzard is much more profitable for MTX compared to Valves deal which shares profits with non-employees for example.

Dude what the fuck are you talking about. I hope this is pasta or this is next level cringe of someone trying to sound smart

Why take on a hugely challenging and risky project when you can just sit back and earn fat stacks of cash doing literally nothing.

Because you can afford it? You've got nothing to lose when you've already made enough to retire for the next hundred thousand years.

Valve has a flat managment structure, there are no bosses and nothing ever gets done, it's been well known for a while now what a disaster it is to work there.
Valve is principled to the extreme, and all they do is fail as a result of it.

I just need the ~4 people to get freed up to finish the TF2 comic. That's it. That's all I fucking need from Valve and I can cease to keep tabs on them and ignore their fucking cavalcade of failure forever. All Underlord has to do is fucking crash and burn in the hardest way possible and they MIGHT get the time to do it.

For all intents and purpose those people and their specific set of skills by being artists means they are somewhat insulated from Valve's horrific life-draining quality that destroys the will of all their programmers to live. The artist is still writing and cranking out her adorable WoW fanfiction sketches on her downtime. If Underlord eats utter shit the lore writers won't have to do any more work on DotA and they can finally finish the fucking comic.

All they do is try to find ways to monetize shit. OR they just make experimental in-house conceptual work that will never see the light of day. It's a bizarre dichotomy.

>Why take on a hugely challenging and risky project
They have, it's called VR and it's a gonna be a long fucking road, I hope they'll succeed but I know that they'll hesitate and lose it to facebook in the long run.

people have done the math several times over the years, it just works out that there is no monetary incentive for them to make HL3,

Even if they made HL3 is record time (2-3 years, this is pretty much unheard of for a AAA game,) all their dev work was free, (impossible,) and they sold more than the PC game sales record (50million copies at 60$+), they still would have made the more money overall just sitting on their asses from collecting steam revenue.

the only way hl3 would be made is if they gave it to another studio or suddenly everyone in their offices contracted a terminal disease where developing hl3 was the only cure.

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Don't forget Linux support and backing Vulkan (as a part of Linux support)

>contracted a terminal disease where developing hl3 was the only cure.
Genetic engineering anons know what they must do

Why do assume that if underlords kicks the bucket the artists/writers will go back to tf2 and not dota 2?

>gives Linux support to the thousands of users who have Linux
>spends millions to develop VR games
>doesn't give a fuck about games

I really think they need to somewhat alter their current structure and add a junior/intern type level. It would go so far toward maintaining existing stuff in games like dota/cs/tf2 that would eliminate most of the complaints about those games while they work on their new stuff. There is so much low hanging fruit that the community has literally gone through the effort of listing out, ranging from things as simple as certain strings not being populated for tooltips or certain cosmetics breaking in updates. The only explanation I can think for why these things go untouched for so long is that it is simply not worth the cost of paying the highly experience senior devs to look into them.

I think that's the best they can do for now, the internal culture seems to far gone to actually produce anything of interest. Their last big game design accomplishments were portal 2 and l4d, everything else is almost identical to a previous concept.

Why spend millions making a game when you're already making millions selling other people's games

Yeah, I've seen a few posts from people who worked there saying the same thing. You can't get any direction or advice because the senior/influential people just say, 'Hey buddy I'm not your boss, do what you want.' But at the same time it's impossible to actually get anything done without their approval and support.

They gave up on Ubuntu like cucks. Why not continue support for literally the most accessible and popular distro?

because they were going to drop 32 bit support

What do Valve employees do all day?

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