How did one of the best developers of all time get so lazy?

Basically what it says.

Valve Software made some of the most defining and revolutionary games of all time, with Half Life 1+2, TF2 and Portal just to name a few

But they just...don't release sequels to some of the best games of all time. I don't know how people can forgive the ending of Episode 2, and they just never bothered to follow them up.

But then you see people lauding Steam as the best thing for PC gaming since sliced bread, and willingly throw all their money at it

It's just...annoying

I don't think they're "lazy" because when they do release stuff it's good. The issue is...there's just no big incentive to actually put stuff out. Valve started as a games company but became a platform. Steam makes an enormous amount of money. No game can compete.

If Valve was lazy they wouldn't have created the Steam Deck, a very nice piece of hardware that is going to be extremely influential. Valve just isn't in the business of making games anymore.

I mean... they don't need to. That's a depressing answer from a creative point of view but they have Steam the worlds most popular storefront for PC. Pretty sure DOTA still just passively prints money as well.

The public secret is that Valve's corporate structure is very bad for actually getting anything done. It's supposedly a company where everyone is equal and you get to choose what project you work on. But in effect that means you get cliques inside the company that hold the power on what projects are focused on. So instead of developing games, you spent most of your time in a real life Succession LARP, trying to harangue people to your cause and undercutting other projects because them succeeding means your project gets shelved.

They're not lazy, the company is just working as designed (but not as intended).

@retris: From all appearances Valve is extremely healthy as a company and makes a lot of money. Steam remains dominant despite several very well funded challengers. The Steam Deck is an enormous hit. I'm not sure that there's any reason to think the company structure isn't working as intended. The one thing it doesn't seem to do well at this point is make video games, but it's not clear that's a priority. People who go there to make video games seem to leave disillusioned and frustrated, but, again, that's a tiny part of the company's business at this point.

Valve pretty much eliminated the need for them to make video games. I mean, it took a passionate mod team to make a decent sequel to Portal 2. And Half-Life EP3? Forget about it. It will never happen. Think about it, if you were in their shoes, and you can make millions off of an app without the stress of making a video game for profit, wouldn't you be lazy about it too? Now, when they make video games, It's because they decided to do so for the fun of it, not because they need to. Konami tried to get out of gaming business by going the gambling Pachinko route, it didn't work out for them.

People often take the path of least resistance in life. This is why many developers today are trying to find a live service game that sticks, so they won't have to stress about making another big AAA game that might flop, and just update the live service game and turn a profit. If Rock Star could get away with just supporting GTA Online, they would. They are only making GTAVI because of the pressure to do so, and GTAVI might be the last mainstream GTA we will ever get.

I recommend playing Half Life Alyx for the answer to this question and more.

They're not lazy. They are a hugely successful company. They have the most successful digital PC game store, a hardware business that seems to be booming (I thought people were being hyperbolic about the Steam Deck until I got one. It's a fantastic device) while spawning an entire new class of PC gaming, and the few games they do put out are either gigantic hits or genuinely game-changing for the medium. They did put out a sequel recently: Counter-Strike 2. Counter-Strike GO was one of the biggest games on PC and by all accounts so far CS2 has been as well. Add on Half-Life Alyx and their recent game release track record has been ridiculous.

Valve is a quality not quantity company. They are privately owned and thus not beholden to whatever bullshit shareholders want. They can put out as many or as few games as they wish. They built the best PC game delivery system. When the competition showed up Valve stepped up to the plate and beat them all not by brute force or nefariousness but by providing a superior service. In a way they do what we wish corporations actually would do: compete by providing a good product and being competent rather than using financial advantages to race-to-the-bottom their competition to death. Valve is one of the few big non-enshittified tech/games companies left.

Between the Steam store, DOTA 2, and CS GO/CS2, Valve could have just sat on their hands and raked in the money. They didn't though. They took a huge risk in the hardware business. At first it didn't work out well but now it's paying off. The Steam Deck rules not just because it's a comfy system to use, but because Valve has developed it to be this hugely open platform that encourages people to use it in a way that suits them (as opposed to forcing people to use the device solely in a way that maximizes financial benefit for Valve). You can do pretty much anything with a Steam Deck. They could have locked the system down like a console but they didn't and it's paid off for them. I mostly bought the Steam Deck as an emulation machine but I've ended up liking the device so much that I've started buying more games on Steam again just because it's the most convenient way to play games on the Steam Deck (not that Valve locks you out of using other services with the device. You can. I have Epic on my Steam Deck also. I also added several GOG games to my Steam Deck as well and they work great). I could have subscribed to Game Pass for Persona 3 Reload but I bought it on Steam specifically because I wanted to be able to play it on Steam Deck. The Steam Deck is one of those rare devices where they weren't required to MVP the good out of it and it became popular because of this since the designers weren't forced to cut every corner possible so as to eke out a few more cents of cost savings. They built a quality device with a great user experience, which somehow is a rare thing in modern tech.

.. lazy? Nah, they just got big and their priorities have shifted. They've tried:

• Steam Boxes
• SteamOS
• Steam Controllers
• VR
• Artifact
• Half-Life: Alyx
• Dota 2
• CS:GO
• Counter Strike 2
• Steam Deck

They've been busy and there's always been a sense that, if something's not good enough, they'll ice it. I always got the sense with Episode 3 that it was never in a good enough state for them to release. As time wore on, Half-Life 2's FPS approach was being consigned to the past. It took VR for them to go back to that well.

It's a shame that my favourite video game developer of all time had to change in this way, but i am glad they did for the sake of the industry.

Yes i'm one of those "they saved PC gaming" guys but it only becomes more true every day, i'm not going to tell the story there's probably loads of Youtube videos all about it, but at a time when PC was an afterthought and the industry was going digital i believe Steam was and still is the best outcome, and the fact that no one has made a serious attempt to compete with it is evidence that they're apparently the only ones who could or cared to do it, you could even say they're having an impact on how the console makers run their stores by leading the industry in sales and features, imagine a world where no one had Steam to compare to.

Yes i wish they still made games, but i think if we were to compare them to another developer who found themselves in a similar situation it would be Blizzard, raking in billions from World of Warcraft Blizzard had the funds to do absolutely anything they wanted on their own timescale, just like Valve, yet besides a few successes somehow they still ended up bound to the shackles of corporate greed and um... other things.

I'm not waiting with baited breath for a Half Life 3 announcement, if they keep going the VR route i'll just be disappointed, but what Steam has created does make up for it, any games they do make from here are a bonus.

It's possible for a company to be both lazy and successful. Steam has become a market standard on PC without realistic competition. Steam makes a ridiculous amount of money without a whole lot of input from Valve who basically just need to make sure that the servers are on at all times.

People in this thread have pointed out a few things that Valve has done, with varying successes. But when you divide Valve's output with how many years they've been where they are, it's hard to make any other conclusion that they just don't do a whole lot. Many of those things were honestly rather half-assed too. The Steam client's design is severely outdated and it is both bloated with features that nobody uses and missing features that people have been asking for years. With the amount of adult games on Steam, it is crazy that it wasn't until now that they finally made it so that you can hide them for your friends lists.

People have also mentioned the flat organization structure where Valve employees basically do whatever the hell they want all day and have no bosses to report. The problem with this is that people work on the fun stuff, but in every project you eventually have to do the things that nobody wants to do, and with no bosses to oversee the project it's easier to just abandon it and move on to something else.

I've long since given up on Half-Life and every other game they make, except for Counter-Strike which I still play occasionally. But I do think that it's rather disrespectful to their customers for them to not give them any closure. If Valve didn't want to do the development on those games, they could outsource it. Would Half-Life 3 be as good as Half-Life 2 if somebody else made it, probably not but at least it would get made.

I find it really weird to use the word lazy in 2024 to describe anything that a genuine video game developer puts out. Sure, there is shovelware that is both lazy in a way and a grift, I suppose, but most real games, even when corners had to be cut, had tons of effort and hard work thrown into them.

I also find it really weird, in 2024, to say that a person, collection of people, or company, are lazy for not pumping out more content. Games are fun and also art and both fun things and art are best created when they aren't treated like squeezing blood from a stone.

@sombre:

Remember that valve has just released two new games on their massively updated source 2 engine in CS2 and HL Alex. They’ve moulded Source 2 into a new scalable VR ready engine with industry leading physics and I doubt they’re ready to stop two games in.

It’s an open secret that they’re working on a half life related shooter code named Neon Prime and it looks like Portal three is also being worked on.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/portal/3-valve-new-game-half-life-left-4-dead