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 is still a top tier org, but they simply make too much money in the publishing business to bother with game development anymore. Any sales would be peanuts to what they are making through developer fees and the marketplace. This is why all of their releases in the last decade have been F2P.

Sounds like a perfect environment to make games. No budget or schedule pressure, virtually limitless resources so the staff can strive to make art with love and without the corruption of chasing a bottom line.

The entire media industry on almost every format is chasing nostalgia because they refuse to recreate the environment that made endearing stories and experiences in the first place.

> virtually limitless resources so the staff can strive to make art with love and without the corruption of chasing a bottom line.

which means they have no obligation to ship. And so it is with the valve-time, they never shipped.

Some pressure (monetary usually) is required. Not to mention that "strive to make art" is not a commercially viable objective - the owners of steam will basically be operating a charity for these artists.

>the owners of steam will basically be operating a charity for these artists

If that's what it takes to make something worth playing, then so be it.

Was Bungie in its day a charity? Or did they just get it? 20 years later the magic is gone and Microsoft is desperately trying to figure out how to make the goose lay an egg. As long as they're optimizing quarterly reports they'll never get there.