[AimHere]

It's a bit disingenuous to just mention Half Life, although note that work on Half Life series games was still ongoing as of last year (and they did a fair amount of work on the whole series in ~2012/2013 porting it to other operating systems).

Those 'blank' 10 years saw the release of Left 4 Dead 1/2, Team Fortress 2, Portal 1/2 and CSGO, for instance, as well as that 'little' Dota2 (which is clearly a large game by any metric you care to choose). At least three of those games involve regular ongoing content infusions. Add in the development of the Source 2 engine, and the Steam Controller, and the work on the SteamOS platform and whatever else on Steam Machines.

This is out of the 330 employees that also support those >100 million customers using the service on a regular, possibly daily, basis. As I pointed out, Rockstar uses more manpower than Valve just to create essentially one game every few years. The last GTA game I bought (San Andreas) did have graphics well behind the state of the art too.

Even if we assume that those 330 employees are doing nothing but working on Steam, it's still a tiny number compared to the customer base. AirBnB, for instance, has had 2 million listings in it's lifetime, and it has about 2300 employees. Uber has over 6000 employees on about 8 million customers, and both those cases are ones where people aren't typically regular users.

[huac]

the majority of those airbnb/uber numbers are customer support not engineering

[AimHere]

Which makes whatever Valve does all the more impressive.

[izacus]

None of the "blank" games are Valve's IPs but acquisitions which kind of stopped in development or releases after Valve acquisition. Half-Life was their last original IP and even that ended in a complete cliff hanger with Episode 3 or sequel nowhere to be found.

It seems that Valve has serious problems actually pushing their games to completion since they started printing money with Steam and pressure to actually release went away.

[AimHere]

> None of the "blank" games are Valve's IPs but acquisitions which kind of stopped in development or releases after Valve acquisition.

TF2, CSGO and Dota 2 are regularly, and visibly updated constantly. In no way are these moribund or 'stopped in development'; the latter two are still among the most played and watched competitive games online.

It's also stretching things to say that Valve 'acquired' Portal and it was dropped 'after acquisition', since Valve essentially bought the team that made a small gameplay prototype and fleshed out the mechanic into two full-fledged AAA games.

So that just leaves 'Left 4 Dead', which was a case of Valve buying a company, publishing it's game and then putting out a full-on sequel. Given how similar L4D2 was to L4D1 (to the point where the first game was essentially contained inside the second, and there was even a threatened boycott by fans), would it really have been a smart move to make a third so soon?

Sure, it's been, what, three years since the last full game release by Valve. That's quite a long time, and there is no doubt less pressure to release sooner because they're sitting on their money-printing machine, but that sort of timeframe isn't exactly unprecedented in this business. The Rockstar studio I mentioned is on a 5-7 year turnaround for it's one main title - though it does aid and abet Rockstar's other studios.

I suspect part of what's going on is that Valve is uber PR-conscious these days, given it's position in the market and can afford to be a ultra-conservative about quality control (though hopefully not in game design) in any new game it's going to put out.

[frik]

Portal was a acquire hire, the originsl game was a free game from a students competition. It was a freeware but full game that takes about two hours to complete. Of course the graphic looked worse and there was little narrative, it was a students project after all. Portal 2 was based on additional aquirehire as well (colored water splash features), from followup competition, game is freeware as well.

Left 4 Dead, company was bought.

Team Fortress was a Mod for Quake. Through a aquire hire transfered the Mod to Half Life 1 (GolgSource engine based on Quake 1 engine). Team Fortress 2 was planned to be released in 1999/2000. Though it took additional 11 years and at least complete restart to release Team Fortress 2 based on Source engine.

CounterStrike was a free Mod from fans for Half Life 1. They aquirehired the team around CounterStrike 0.9. Some say it went downhill from there. CS 1.4 was the last classic CS.

CS Source was a port from GoldSource to Source engine. As Source engine is just an incremental evolution, it was just a matter of building the game again and later replacing textures and models with higher ones, etc.

CS Go is a rehash of CS Source simplified for console gamers and ported to consoles.

Dota was originally a fan-made Mod to WarCraft 3. Valve aquirehired them to create Dota2, a standalone version based on Source engine. Blizzard wasn't amused and announced a similar game a few days after Valve announced Dota2 back then.

Half Life 1 (GoldSource) is based on Quake 1 engine (with small parts from Quake 2 engine), and of cource evolved. Half Life 2 (Source engine) evolved from GoldSource engine. Videos from HL2 beta show clearly the old DX7 renderer and loading older HL1 map format. Valve worked on HL2 episode 3 and Warren Spector (Deus Ex, System Shock) and his former company worked on HL2 episode 4. But Valve decided to shut down both. The unclear situation for several years makes HL fans angry. HL2 episode 3 / HL3 is the new Duke Nukem Forever, at least that one got released after 11 years - we will see about HL2. We all remember also the shitshow around the HL2 release. The infamous HL2 demo at E3 2004 was faked and the game was nowhere to be ready. The leaked video footage a year later showed how far behind Valve was behind the announced release schedule. Half Life 2 was finally released another year later with heavily shortened gameplay and many previously features removed. Making it basically a different game that feels very differently to the original Half Life 1.