Commercial failure, perhaps. I'd suggest not delivering Half Life 3 (or even HL2: Episode 3) is their biggest failing. All the resources in the world, and they're happy resting on their laurels. It's such a shame.
Valve has very little reason to make a single player game. Why make hl3 while someone else can make a similar selling game and you taking 30% of it? A game like artifact is more appealing to them because it has a potential to become next hearthstone, which is much more profitable than a single player game that only sells once
Also hype around hl3 is too much, it will be below expectations no matter how much hard Valve tries.
Agreed. Basically, not being able to both run Steam and continue being one of the best game development studios in the industry, which they surely were 20 years ago.
I understand that they're going to naturally follow the money and put their resources where those resources will do the most good, it's just a shame that they couldn't keep succeeding at the thing that made them big in the first place. They've made many great games.
Indeed there’s no level of success for a narrative FPS big enough to warrant waiting so long on such a valuable IP. Why let the workflow/team get stale?...the answer must be that engineering was rerouted to Steam or porting or something but they could’ve made at least tens of millions * several sequels by now...
When you control a near-monopoly App Store and can take 30% of revenue from so many successful developers, there’s little incentive to actually make ambitious games
Steam is hundreds of times more profitable than any game could ever be.
tens of millions ... is what you make _in a month_ by selling hats inside free to play game. Valve has precisely zero incentive to make any game except for concepts centered around selling digital property, coincidentally like a computer card game!
Also hype around hl3 is too much, it will be below expectations no matter how much hard Valve tries.