I absolutely cannot believe that this picture is now ten years old.

95k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

I'll never understand it. On one hand I get that Steam makes an insane amount of money, but on the other hand Half Life 3 would be 100% successful from a financial standpoint. They've got nothing to lose and millions to gain

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u/DreamSphinx 26d ago

I feel like Valve is one of the few companies that care about their reputation, and the amount of hype for Half-Life 3 had grown so large that no matter what they released it was going to get hate due to not living up to expectations.

I feel like Half-Life: Alyx bypassed that by not being called Half-Life 3, and also exploring and nearly mastering an entirely new medium.

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u/WebGhost0101 26d ago

Exactly... i have no doubt that Half-Life: Alyx was envisioned as Half-Life 3 by everyone who worked on it. Valve was just very aware of some the the dangerous hype cards they got and they played those cards perfectly.

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u/az-PS 26d ago

This is a pretty odd take, I personally have a very low opinion of valve because they introduced gambling habits to minors and nearly skirted the law regarding this for over a decade.

That's a pretty despicable business practice. Seeing how a large source of their revenue and success was tied to this practice.

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u/gelatinskootz 26d ago

I mean, technically CSGO, Dota, and TF2 are rated M, so they're not entirely liable for minors playing them. But also, the hat/crate/crafting system was pretty well received when it got implemented in TF2, even with all the memes, so I find it hard to blame them fully for just continuing on that positive reception. And it's not like they were the first or only ones to do it. Shitty that it happened the way it did, but I don't find them particularly bad for it

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u/tolbolton 26d ago

This is a pretty odd take, I personally have a very low opinion of valve because they introduced gambling habits

You can have an opinion about Valve as a business but even if its low it won't harm the reputation of Valve as a single player game producer.

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u/JoefromOhio 26d ago

Fully agree… anything named half life 3 will be shit on and called a disappointment even if it’s an amazing game. The hype train has gone on way too long and they don’t want to be another cyberpunk.

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u/Ayjayz 26d ago

People said the same thing about half-life 2.

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u/siliconwolf13 26d ago

hl2 came out only like 6 years after hl1, it has been nearly 14 years since the last hl2 game came out, what the hell kind of comparison is that?

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u/DreamSphinx 26d ago

And there was also Half-Life: Blue Shift, Half-Life: Opposing Forces, and Half-Life: Decay in-between those two games, so it's not like it was complete emptiness in those 6 years.

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u/shawnisboring 26d ago

People have been saying literally this for the past decade.