Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update

20-25 years ago a handful of companies had a weird hold on me. I’d jump on anything Google made back then. Blizzard could sell me any game they came up with. If it was from Blizzard, it was gonna be great.

Lost all of it obviously. Not a single company has my loyalty anymore.

Except if valve were to release a mystery black box with faint lambda symbol on it. I’d pay whatever they asked for it.

My theory is that there's a period when a studio has huge early success (plus in the case of Valve, they started with huge amounts of money from being former MS employees) that lets them devote themselves to their mission of making games, before either mission creep or dilution with new hires occurs over time either from staff naturally changing over time or expanding. Another factor is that when aiming to 'go big' and realize what they can do with lots of resources, they need to partner/join with others that don't work the same way and will influence them.

Valve still knows how to make excellent games. Deadlock is a Valve game in alpha, and I think it's going to be very popular once released.