The world of video games is constantly changing and with it the producers and developers of video games are also evolving. Valve, among all large companies, is one of the best examples of this evolution (for some, involution). Born as a developer of great games, like Half-Life 3, Portal 2 and Left 4 Dead 3, Valve has long been no longer interested in devoting itself to such projects: now, an ex-employee of Valve says in his own words about it.
The information comes from an anonymous user’s comment, who presents himself as a former employee of Valve under an article in The Week which states that “How capitalism killed one of the best video game studios”. The anonymous user confirms this hypothesis and states that society has lost all interest in classic single-player projects since the potential gain will never be comparable to that of microtransactions.
“There was a small group that were working on Left for Dead 3 (cancelled shortly after I joined), and a couple guys poking around with pre-production experiments for Half-Life 3 (it will never be released). But effectively all the attention was focused on cosmetic items and “the economy” of the three big games (DOTA, CS:GO, and TF2). One very senior employee even said that Valve would never make another single player game, because they weren’t worth the effort,” he said.
Portal 2, for example, has generated 200 million dollars, while the sale of skins and the like allows you to earn hundreds of millions, with a clearly lower production effort, since they are often objects designed by the users themselves and not by employees of Valve. It is explained that a small group was working on Left 4 Dead 3, but it was immediately canceled. Even Half-Life 3 was being tested under a couple of people, but nothing will ever be published.
The ex-employee joined Valve, he says, with great happiness, thinking of working for one of the largest development studios in the world, but abandoned it due to depression, after discovering that all he did was collect the proceeds of Steam and make cosmetic items for old games.
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