This feels like another sour grapes article by someone that wants Valve to focus on their favorite games instead. Dota 2 is Steam's most played game [1] and has

This feels like another sour grapes article by someone that wants Valve to focus on their favorite games instead. Dota 2 is Steam's most played game [1] and has been so for most of the last decade. I have spent thousands of hours playing it during that time and I know dozens of people personally who have played it even more. We are happy that Valve is providing unprecedented support for the game. The kind of support which is rare. Just look at new games like EA's Anthem, where players are complaining about barely receiving any updates, although they were promised a bunch. Dota 2's success doesn't come from a release dump in 2013 and then just an influx of hats. There's continuous development that's happening on the game. There are new features added all the time, game mechanic changes, new heroes, new items, map changes etc. The whole engine was swapped out from Source to Source 2. There was a year where there were two branches of Dota 2 being played concurrently as this transition happened. Very few games in history have received this kind of attention. On top of that Dota 2 has one of the best executed e-sports scenes. Valve has been directing the scene structurally, supporting it with unrivaled prize pools [2], and building a lot of features into the game to support e-sports, e.g. in-client spectating with both observer camera and player perspective. So no, Valve has not mutated into a financial middleman. They're hard at work at supporting one of the most successful games in history. The kind of success that other game developers can only dream of. Sure that means they can't also be working on a bunch of other games, but that doesn't make them any less of a game developer. -- [1] https://store.steampowered.com/stats/ https://store.steampowered.com/stats/ [2] $179,702,427 have been given out in prize money (mostly from Valve) thus far. https://www.esportsearnings.com/games https://www.esportsearnings.com/games