Valve doesn’t need to make games anymore. Their corporate structure allows for it, but relies on people at the company wanting to work on it.

But if they don’t, it’s not really a problem. The company is doing fine.

I think they just lost interest. They got back to it with Alyx because VR was exciting and new territory to explore.

We know the answers to this. First, we got Half-Life: Alyx, which is a phenomenal Half-Life game that happens to be a VR game. Slight spoilers, but to say that Half-Life 3 is promised at the end of that game is an understatement.

Second, if you’ve already played Alyx, Keighley put out The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx, which has a full timeline of everything they worked on since Portal 2, including cancelled games. One of those games was Half-Life 3. It would have been a game with procedurally generated levels interspersed with static set pieces, which sounds similar to a single player version of that game The Crossing they were working on. If you ask me, that design makes plenty of sense for putting a bow on a series with a time- and space-hopping protagonist in a series that always ends with cliffhangers. It didn’t come together though, so it got cancelled.

Alyx was put together in part because letting all of their employees dictate their own projects was not getting the same results that it used to, so there was a bit more direction with the project than Valve had had in the years prior.

The reason no one is making HL3 is because no one wants to, at least not long term.

Idk if you know much about how Valve is structured as a game studio, but it’s a bit atypical. It’s not like Gabe Newell comes in and says “today everybody starts working on HL3”, projects get greenlit and then whichever employees want to work on them are free to do so, and if they decide they’re uninterested, for whatever reason, they can leave the project.

What this means, is that if a project starts to pick up steam (no pun intended) within the company, more and more people join in, and this creates a passionate team. Various Half-Life projects since Ep2 have been started, none were finished (until Alyx), not because they were decisively axed for more corporate reasons like many other games, but because for one reason or another, the devs became uninterested or burned out, and went to work on other things they actually wanted to work on.

I think at this point, the only way we’ll ever see HL3 is if a team comes up with something completely groundbreaking and is absolutely dedicated to getting it done. Apparently, there just hasn’t been that winning combo yet. I can’t blame them, because if they half assed any aspect of it, they’d never hear the end of it.

The hype train is absolutely dangerous.

The anticipation for HL3 would be terribly high, and so would be the expectations of millions of lovers of the franchise, making sure anything other than a perfect game would be met with lots of negative reactions.

And it’s not just about a single game either. A bad HL3 could end up tarnishing the legacy of the other titles, forever ruining what is now a beloved franchise. Remember what happened to Game of Thrones? Who would ever risk something like that happening? Or, speaking of games, look at how much goodwill Bethesda burned with the release of Starfield.

I can’t think of a game that Valve has released just to make money except for Artifact which totally flopped.

From what I understand, Valve has a non-hierarchical internal personnel structure and projects are started because someone has an idea that other people at the company like and want to work on.

Half-Life 3 won’t get traction inside Valve unless it has something to push the envelope like the other main-line games had. Half-Life had unrivaled first person storytelling. Half-Life 2 has unrivaled physics to play with. Half-Life Alyx had an interactive environment unlike anything else that exists even still. My money says if Valve can’t think of something gameplay-wise that’s as enticing right now as any of the previous games had when they were released, they don’t care that the story is still on a cliffhanger.

Half Life was always about pushing the boundaries of gaming. The first Half Life with their combination of story telling in a 3D shooter environment was absolutely at the sharp end of the field at that time. If you’ve seen the Black Mesa documentary you’ll know why HL2 was such a hit and how it was revolutionary at that time. After that they did some DLC, but Valve wasn’t happy with what they were doing. It wasn’t groundbreaking, it was just creating content for the sake of content. As they didn’t need any more money from creating games, they opted to not create HL3. It wasn’t till VR became more mainstream they again tried to do something at the sharp end of the field, by creating HL Alyx.

I don’t know what would prompt them to ever make a HL3 if such a thing even exists.

I think at this point, no one can ever live up to the expectations for the game and Valve is too afraid to fuck it up.

I think HL3 will only happen to push some frontier in gaming, like they did with Alyx and VR. It’s the only safe move with that franchise and all the hype

Valve isn‘t publicly traded (AFAIK) so they don‘t have to squeeze every last penny if they don‘t want to. And Steam revenue alone can fund anything gabeN wants to do. They don‘t have any ideas for HL3 they‘re satisfied with so they don‘t make it. And I respect that a lot TBH.

Valve used to make games, now they make money

It’s a tough one as it’s on such a pedestal now

What you are asking for is for Valve to start behaving like developers like EA and Activision, who keep milking the crap out of their franchises with one bland generic release after the other for a quick cash grab.

The fact that Gaben doesn’t force his employees to work on the game just to make money is the reason why Half-Life games are of such good quality. The employees at Valve work on what they are motivated to work on at the moment. They aren’t being given arbitrary deadlines from overhead either. This is how we got amazing games like Team Fortress 2 and the Portal games too. Both Half-Life games were major milestones in video game history by pushing the envelope. And currently, no Valve employees believe that the conditions are currently set for this to happen with a new Half-Life 3. It would never meet the hype if they tried right now and it would be a huge disappointment.

Half-Life 3 isn’t vaporware either as Valve openly admits that they are not working on it at the moment.

Just accept that great things can’t happen as often as we wished they did.

Speaking of Team Fortress 2 and Portal, I have been around to witness other attempted iterations of what TF2 could have been been, only to be abandoned by Valve because it wasn’t good enough. Then Valve finally got their vision for what the game ultimately ended up being and then suddenly everyone was motivated to work on the game. The first Portal game was also an experiment that motivated Valve employees to work on the sequel. Hopefully one day there will be a lightbulb moment in Valve and everyone will be motivated on working on Half-Life 3 and the resulting product will surely be worthy of the name. But you can’t force it to happen.

Hopefully it will happen while Gaben is still in control of Valve though because there is no telling what will happen to the company’s unique culture and philosophy after that.

I think it’s 100% that steam makes so much money on its own. Valve stopped being a game developer once steam really took off and became the behemoth it is. Valve is in the e-commerce business, period.

I loved Alyx too for what it’s worth but my expectations for the future are dim.

Valve these days don’t make things just to make money. They only make things that interest and excite them. HL3 would most likely just end up being more of the same, which isn’t exciting from a designer or developer point of view. They need a hook to get excited about it, and until that happens it’s just not worth the time or effort to do. In the meantime, they’re making plenty of money from Steam sales.

If Valve can’t do something that will push their business and the whole industry forward, they’ll just do some other thing that will.

Doing sequels after sequels will only stagnate the franchise, making Valve lose time. For that, they rely on publishers like Activision, EA, and Ubisoft among others.