Hell, their next big game they've announced is a fucking collectible card game spinoff for DOTA 2, which is likely to also be a F2P game fueled by microtransactions using steam's marketplace.
Sure there's left 4 dead 2, portal 2, dota 2(unlikely to ever see a "3" since it's still raking in cash). They dropped the numbering from CS so they don't even have to worry about making a "2" let alone 3. TFC was called such and allowed TF2 to remain being called 2. And that doesn't even get into weird conspiracy theory territory about Valve not releasing a "3" for anything. Then you have to consider that there is no way in hell Valve can meet the hype surrounding an episode 3 or even HL 3 at this point. Just look at CS:GO, it's 6 years old, still sells copies, still turns a profit off of selling keys for crates, they won't get that out of making a single player focused game.Īctually developing a game means spending money on marketing, pay salaries of developers, continuing to support the game after sales have dropped off and the price drops, and so on. Just look at what Valve has done for the past few years? Big picture mode for steam, steamos, steambox, steam controller, it's all about finding ways to expand their user base because that's what they make money from. They make money off of every game sale, every microtransaction for their own games, every marketplace transaction, with peak total player counts being around the 13 million mark. Valve makes fuck loads of cash from Steam, and that is a cash cow which isn't going anywhere any time soon, and while there's still overhead I suspect there's a lot less issues involving money spent and development time for a burst of income since it's a steady income stream.