"Maybe 1 game per-year? For a company of around 400 with essentially zero effort/free publishing model that's pretty poor." One game per year is actually prett

"Maybe 1 game per-year? For a company of around 400 with essentially zero effort/free publishing model that's pretty poor." One game per year is actually pretty good for studio of Valve's stature, especially if you consider that many of those 400 work mostly, and maybe exclusively, on Steam. It is not uncommon for highly profitable studios to release just a few games each decade, especially if they are independent. So it is important to keep things in perspective. Half-Life 2 was released in 2004. Per Wikipedia, this is the list of games developed by id Software (200+ employees) since 2004: - Wolfenstein 3D Classic (2009) - Doom Classic (2009) - Quake Live (2010) - Rage HD (2010) - Rage (2011) - Doom 3 BFG Edition (2012) Of those, probably only Rage sold a significant number of copies across all platforms. id Software also published the following games in the same time frame: - Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil — Nerve Software (2005) - Quake 4 — Raven Software (2005) - Doom RPG — Fountainhead Entertainment (2005) - Orcs & Elves — Fountainhead Entertainment (2006) - Enemy Territory: Quake Wars — Splash Damage (2007) - Wolfenstein RPG — Electronic Arts (2008) - Doom Resurrection — Escalation Studios (2009) - Wolfenstein — Raven Software (2009) Of those, my guess is that only Quake 4, and maybe Wolfenstein, sold in significant amounts. Since 2004, Valve has shipped HL2:EP1, HL2:EP2, Portal, Team Fortress 2, L4D 1, L4D 2, Portal 2, Alien Swarm and CS:GO. While none was the hit that HL2 was, few studios have achieved that level of success in the same time frame. Or take a look at Blizzard. They have at least five, maybe ten times as many employees as Valve, but have released "only" five or six games since 2004, most of which were WoW extensions. My point is that if Valve is not shipping games at a faster pace, it's because they can afford it. Steam is probably printing enough money that they can afford to spend as much time as they want iterating on their engines and games. I would be very surprised if you were right about the motivations for the layoff. "Valve is going to build a new cross-platform engine [...] HL3 will be the showcase for this engine." This isn't much of a prediction. HL2 was released on multiple platforms, and it is reasonable to assume that HL3 will follow suit. Edit: Gabe Newell has addressed the speculations. http://mobile.theverge.com/2013/2/13/3986540/valves-gabe-newell-addresses-layoffs-we-arent-canceling-any-projects http://mobile.theverge.com/2013/2/13/3986540/valves-gabe-new...