Artifact is released (Also Valve acknowledges Half-Life exists) - Sensationalist Headlines

More people doesn't necessarily mean faster development. It has been noted that team sizes in the industry are ballooning due to over-specialization, which results in lower efficiency due to miscommunication and organizational inertia. Valve is not subject to the rigid top-down hierarchy that other AAA studios are, so I'd imagine there's more flexibility in terms of your role on a team. It is despite that fact that their team sizes are larger that AAA studios manage to release more regularly than Valve, not because of it. right, if they had released other things, not if they hadn't released what they did. They didn't need to shelve DOTA 2, they needed to release anything that wasn't based on microtransactions. They could've made another smaller game like Portal, even. Even if what you were saying about Valve's size and quality standards were true, there's no reason that the games they released had to be based on microtransactions, unless they really did need to be based on microtransactions.

One thing AAA has going for them is that they're managed and focused on specific things. That's why Call of Duty can be consistently released, leap frogging the previous game. Valve lacking that allows employees to work on what they want but means they might also just drop their current work and go another team in Valve and work with them. This means that not only do some projects fail mid-development. Some might not even get restarted. AAA will always release new games because they are expected to from their bosses/shareholders but Valve simply doesn't give a fuck about that. Valve has always stated that they release what they consider to be ready. Valve are always making games, problem can lie in that they never finish them. The sudden drop of interest in HL3 started when Valve dropped their previous work style which was having a goal and upper management. I think the problem lies in Valve's lack of upper management. One small team decides to make Artifact and monetize the hell out of it but rest of valve sub-teams can release great content for TF2/Dota/CS:GO. I still do not think Valve has some rotten motives other than they simply aren't focused. The lab could count as a small game. Hellblade looks pretty good and very impressive to be made by 20 people. I'm gonna guess they were very focused on what they wanted with the game.

Based on what ex-employees have had to say, most of what Valve has publicly said about employees being 100% free to work on what they want is basically just PR talk. They do have cabals that you can join, but there's a hidden layer of soft power driven by office politics. It could totally be true, for example, that if Gabe decides certain types of games aren't worth working on that he can use his influence to get those projects squashed. Based on things Gabe has said publicly about "retro" singleplayer games and singleplayer+, it might be fair to speculate that he's crushing the projects that don't involve microtransactions. Not necessarily saying that it was specifically Gabe that did it, but whether he merely drank the "social is everything" kool-aid or distributed it himself doesn't really matter. The results speak for themselves. it was a set of tech demos produced for their VR team that they just kind of threw into a package and threw on steam, it wasn't a game project. despite the kind of talent a company with Valve's reputation would attract, no one at the company has the passion to work on a piece of commercial art. Pretty unfortunate that their "work on what you want" structure just happens to produce microtransaction based cashgrabs, huh?

reading r/artifact is very weirdly similar to reading r/bitcoin

"Valve announces that Artifact will cost $5 to launch each time" This is good for Artifact. HODL

That's another problem when lacking upper management too. Don't forget that Gabe Newell has said before that they're working on at least one fully-fledged singleplayer game. Recently, Gabe has also said they're going to start shipping games again. Artifact is the only game to be heavily focused on MTX. So I don't think the structure is only producing cashgrabs considering how long Valve has operated like this.

well with r/bitcoin, when the price of bitcoin fell through the floor, the subreddit had this really weird atmosphere. There was a massive elephant in the room of the value plummeting but everyone ignoring it and being like "just happy to have my bitcoins fuck fiat eh lads?". But every so often someone would burst in being like "MY PORTFOLIO IS WORTH NOTHING AAAAA" it's a similar deal with artifact, where people are posting stuff like Anybody else not worried AT ALL about the future of this game? when there's a massive elephant in the room of the play count being sub 20k a week after launch, and occasionally someone is bursting in being like "AAAAAA"