From the outside, all we see is very few games being produced. From the inside, its far more complex; something like a Dark Decade for Valve where even they weren't sure what they should be working on. Hundreds of failed prototypes and ideas. Major technical issues with Source 2 that took years to fix. L4D3 was under development, but ran into huge scope creep (full open world with variable length days depending on time of year and hemisphere, variable tides based on moon cycle, crazy stuff like that). They were working on a tech showcase codenamed ARTI/Artifact using a brand new voxel-based game engine separate from Source (and after the game was canceled, the name was taken and used for the now-released Dota 2 Card Game).
Can't think of a Valve game that doesn't fit this description.
It's a heck of a "demo". It's about the size of Half Life 2.
It's weird, they've got some seriously good franchises that they haven't done anything with; Half-Life could use a sequel every few years; Portal could become a massive franchise; Team Fortress 2, CS:GO and DOTA 2 are huge money makers but I think they're reluctant to make sequels to those because of balancing and pissing off the existing, invested player bases. (I think that may have happened when they went from CS:S to CS:Go, where the latter had very lucrative monetization options, lucrative but morally dubious because of off-site trading and gambling)
the only thing I see that they could really change in a new title would be the graphics, but I don't think that's much of a selling point to the audience. cs players care more about getting >100fps on their potato computer than pretty graphics.
And Dota 2 is by far their biggest game.
I'm old enough that I remember people saying this in 2014. Actual data on active users - https://steamcharts.com/app/570#All. This indicates that it's far from it's peak of 1.2M active players but 700k active is still respectable.
> Dota 2 is by far their biggest game.
Not by players. That would be CS:GO (https://steamcharts.com/app/730) with 900k active players.
