It's Valve, people work on what they want to work on, and often, that's not what gamers want them working on.
I think they expected the modding community to fill the gaps, which they have.
Valve openly suffers from the "zero billions" problem, which effectively blocks small, safe projects from getting off the ground.
They have enough cash to focus all their effort on moonshots, and in the long run it will serve them well.
Valve is barely a game company these days.
They barely take care of TF2, their golden child nowadays. Its got like one dev working on it, and most of his work is implementing community made stuff. And TF2 is still making them money.
Is that still a popular game? Steam says I haven't played it since 2018.
I thought their big games were counterstrike and left 4 dead 2.
TF2 is still consistently in the top 10 most played on steam. It has has a botting problem for almost 4 years now.
On top of being among the top 10 most played games on Steam to this day, just last year it reached its highest player count of all time. It also has a very active community to this day.
Although it may be more appropriate to call CS its golden child, TF2 is probably its second best
Why would they? What could they offer that the hundreds of community test chambers and mods don't?
Quality assurance and play testing.
Plenty of the mods (portal stories Mel, portal reloaded) have plenty of playtesting. Valve already did most of the work with the base game, making sure the mechanics all function properly. But I think it's just as feasible to design a good puzzle with 5 playtesters as it is with 100.
Because someone did the math and decided that the cost of development plus the cost of ongoing support was less than what they'd make selling the DLC, or was less than what they'd make selling TF2 hats or whatever
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