The Fall of Valve

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• November 19, 1998 – Valve releases Half-Life.

• April 7, 1999 – Valve releases Team Fortress Classic.

• November 9, 2000 – Valve releases Counter-Strike.

• October 7, 2004 – Valve releases Counter-Strike: Source.

• November 16, 2004 – Valve releases Half-Life 2.

• June 1, 2006 – Valve releases HL2: Episode One

• November 29, 2006 – Garry Newman releases Garry’s Mod, which launches the Source engine into popularity even further.

• October 10, 2007 – Valve releases HL2: Episode Two, **alongside** Portal, and Team Fortress 2.

• November 17, 2008 – Valve releases Left 4 Dead.

• November 17, 2009 – Exactly one year later, they release Left 4 Dead 2.

• April 18, 2011 – Valve releases Portal 2.

Many lesser titles were omitted, but you get the gist. Throughout the entirety of the 2000’s, Valve was on a roll, releasing banger after banger. It was the golden age of gaming and they were at the forefront.

Then 2012 came along, and Valve sold their soul. Little did anyone know, all they would care about for the next decade was, primarily, CSGO and Dota. Above all else.

All good things must come to an end, and we had no idea how good we had it until it was over.

Every now and then I am reminded of the turn our societies took after 2012. Perhaps the Mayans were on to something when their calendar ended. For the gaming industry (and in a lot of other places, it seems), the ultimate result was corporations lost their touch and money mattered far more than art and soul.

There isn’t much else I can say in these scriptures that hasn’t already been said by me or others. Just search "the fall of valve software" on YouTube and you’ll see that in the back of our minds, we all have wishes for better days.

The rest of this article is just things I feel people are too afraid to say because Valve fans, even if they pretend to be critical of Valve, still delude themselves from accepting some crucial points.

Half-Life: Alyx – A giant waste of time

I touched on this in “The Failure That Was Half-life: Alyx – A Look Back” massively. I shall touch on it again because Valve fans really irk me, and it causes me to dig deeper and deeper into this short-lived phenomenon. And believe it, it was short-lived.

SNAP knows, as much as I respect the work the developers put into HL:A, I still don’t understand the point of the game.

It didn’t make VR mainstream. It didn’t continue the Half-Life story. It sure helped the selling of VR headsets for a short while… but I’m more interested in playing games, not celebrating corporate victories or platform exclusives.

Valve acted like they made some sort of “flagship”, but in retrospect, Zuckerberg took the reins of VR longer than Valve did. Nobody outside gaming even knows what a Half-Life: Alyx is. Well, they’d more likely know the actual character than the game itself.

Then there is the wasted potential. Half-Life 2 and GMod were the perfect playgrounds that launched the Source engine into its popularity. They were fun, easy to mod, and easy to run.

Source 2 could've had just as big of a release, but Valve wasted the opportunity. They made a platform exclusive that had more Twitch viewers than actual players (and a crappy Counter-Strike port but we won’t talk about that. Yet.)

Nobody in the early stages of development came along and said “perhaps we ought to make something that ISN’T a platform exclusive! Something that will appeal to both the VR crowd AND the PC gaming crowd which got us into this position in the first place!” Alas, that is the sort of customer-revolving reasoning you’d expect from the old Valve.

I have seen Valve fans act as if the development of HL:A was set in stone. They cannot conceptualize potential, and consequently believe Half-Life: Alyx could only be what it is.

Valve had a decade to make literally anything that wasn’t yet another CSGO/DOTA update. They set a gold standard and they kept raising it. Simply scroll up to the top of this post and observe the list I made to see the proof of that.

The gaming industry was being shaken almost every two years, and the years where that didn’t happen? They compensated.

But since 2012, that has died a miserable death. Valve fans nowadays make a feast out of a crumb. The bar has been lowered so much that a short-lived VR exclusive was enough to get everyone roaring and clapping.

When you really think about it, Half-Life: Alyx would’ve been NOTHING without the Half-Life name slapped on it. That’s precisely why Valve used it. How else is mainstream going to be attracted to a VR exclusive? Why, use the Half-Life name and give everyone the hope that twenty-year-old story would finally have some closure, of course!

Alas, nothing about it felt like Half-Life to me. They couldn’t even be bothered to have Merle Dandridge voice Alyx. It was the least they could’ve done.

Half-Life: Alyx was the biggest nothingburger in the gaming industry. In an era where AAA gaming has become barren, the last thing we needed was a VR exclusive. Countless projects got swept under the rug until this useless tech demo finally managed to come out. For all the time they spent fine-tuning a game to accommodate a big ass pair of goggles to inconveniently wear on your head, they could’ve just made Half-Life 3.

I still see people making laughable excuses. “B-b-but Half-Life 3 would never live up to the hype!” which is bullshit because we have seen Rockstar outdo themselves with Red Dead Redemption once, and Grand Theft Auto twice.

Sure. You can’t satisfy everyone. There is, for certain, going to be people that don’t like what Half-Life 3 does (if we ever get it). I may be one of them (if we ever get it).

But on the contrary, I’ve yet to see any reason to hate any installation in the Half-Life series. BESIDES Half-Life: Alyx for the sole fact that it was a VR exclusive.

Even Episode 1, which is considered the most “unfavored” in the franchise, never did anything that made me “dislike” it. It’s certainly not the strongest title in the series, but it’s also not something I consistently write about as being a waste of potential, because unlike Half-Life: Alyx, Episode 1 still had continuity.

Cry(onics) me a river

Valve had a one of a kind collection of stories, universes, voice actors, developers, artists, and writers. The problem is they refuse to do anything with them anymore.

We never got a conclusion for TF2’s comic series.

We never got a conclusion for Half-Life.

Left 4 Dead, we had a lil’ somethin’… but that corpse has rotted.

Even Portal's ending, there's still the question of what happened with the Borealis. What happened with the Combine?

Some of the VA's for TF2's mercs took it upon themselves to do their own IRL series because Valve just refuses to do anything with them anymore.

All the people who wrote these stories, and those who helped turned them into something more real… these people have withered with time. As soon as Valve was hooked on the CSGO/DOTA formula, it didn’t stop. Like a drug. It truly is tragic.

Suck is forever (AKA Take the Valve out of your own eye before you criticize the world)

What exactly happened to Half-Life 3 is not a mystery to those who have their eyes open. Its potential died (probably several times) after 2012, when Valve became mind broken by Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and DOTA 2, as well as Team Fortress 2’s economy.

One quote that sticks with me is a blaringly hypocritical quote by the big man himself.

In the Half-Life 2 anniversary documentary, Gabe Newell said “Late is just for a little while, suck is forever. We could try to force this thing out the door, but that's not the company we want to be, that's not the people we want to be. That's not the relationship we want to have with our customers.”

Gabe, who are you to say such a thing when your company has spent over a decade procrastinating with a highly anticipated sequel, yet you happily pushed out that embarrassment of a card game, Artifact, as well as a VR exclusive that expanded on nothing at any front – narrative wise, marketing wise, and industry wise? Don’t ever criticize EA for anything ever again and then turn your head and equate Valve to the Jesus Christ of the gaming industry after they just pulled some schtick like this.

Secondly, what is “a little while” for all those that died waiting for Half-Life 3? Can you answer that, Gabe?