I’ve agreed with this for the past decade. But considering the scope and costs of games made today, I think that sort of expectation is far too high for Valve to achieve anymore with the type of company they are. The size of development teams has ballooned at every other studio to keep up and budgets are many times higher than what Valve has spent on any game ever.

Sure, Valve makes loads of money from Steam and they could conceivably pour untold millions into hiring a massive team of talented developers to try to produce a worthy new Half Life title as a passion project for Gabe Newell. To what end? It likely still wouldn’t live up to the hype and the process would irreversably upend the way Valve has operated very successfully for decades.