We don't know if L4D3 and HL3 were cancelled, but it's been years since we've had leaks on either one. I'm hopeful for the new VR games, but Artifact's monetisation doesn't fill me with hope after they tried adding mtx to Portal 2. Valve's internal politics is really uncertain to me with how many contrary leaks occur, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt on this.
Ah, this reminds me of why I used to love Valve.
I'm gonna make you go "whoa" there mate because a lot of what you said is conjecture, speculation, or the person in question wasn't specifically talking about Valve itself.
The problem is that you've got to take disgruntled ex-employees comments with a grain of salt, if I'm thinking you got "Employees' bonuses and job security are literally tied to how much money they bring in every fiscal year" from the same place I'm thinking of. And the fact that he was talking about multiple flat-organization studios, not only (and not specifically) Valve.
Half Life 3 and L4D3 might have been in production - but production is such a wide word. They may never have gotten past the "experimenting with a game mechanic" stage, or the concept art stage, or the writing stage. Our only hints at a L4D3 being in production is that one change-feed that was in an image from a TI tour of Valve many years ago. You may say "oh but that leaked Source 2 PDF image" - one image of a remade level does not make a game.
I'm somewhat cynical about Artifact (and Valve) as a whole, but I try not to be overly cynical. I'm sure they know exactly what they're doing with it as far as monetization goes, but I doubt they went into it thinking "money money money money". I mean, they've got fucking Richard Garfield working on it, and the rumor is he came to them, not the other way around.
Ultimately, I believe HL3 (and any other single player games) simply haven't come out because they haven't come up with anything truly innovative or groundbreaking to be the "headliner" for it, so to speak. I mean, Portal 2 wasn't going to be a thing at all; the Final Hours of Portal 2 ebook-thingy went into it a bit but they were working on something called F-Stop that eventually got sidelined as all the other ideas (years since I read it so bear with me if I'm misquoting) the other ideas they were coming up with worked better with Portal than the F-Stop mechanic, I believe.
The rumor regarding Half Life 3 and Left4Dead3 came from VNN. I know, it's Tyler, but seriously, he's gotten a lot better in the last few years, and he legitimately seems to have connections with Valve now, considering that he got free Artifact cards from them and everything. Regardless, the rumor was pretty specific about how first Left4Dead 3 was canceled due to them disagreeing on whether to make it on Source 2 or Unreal (which sure bodes badly for the state of Source 2 if this is true), and then Half Life 3 starting up production immediately, before being canceled due to the massive 2013 layoffs, starting up again less than a year later, and then stopping production again
All of this lines up with everything that was rumored about valve's corporate structure being a lord of the flies-esque hell as described in the twitter feed that we both are talking about. Because why else would Artifact be the only Valve project in recent memory that managed to survive multiple years of development and actually make it to the finish line? As far as I'm concerned, it seems more plausible that Valve's management is actively discouraging people from working on projects like Half Life 3 long term by denying the teams bonuses at the end of the fiscal year, then that the people at Valve that have interest in making groundbreaking single-player games are seemingly unable to commit to a project long term.
I mean, yeah, none of this is confirmed. But I've stopped giving Valve the benefit of the doubt - because what is confirmed without a shadow of a doubt is that Valve has become completely consumed with greed. Which was decisively not the case back a few years before Portal 2, when Gabe Newel halted all game development so the company could experiment with groundbreaking game prototypes.
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