Want to know why Half-Life 3 still has not yet been released? It's because Valve is busy with other things, namely Steam.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Valve's Gabe Newell explained how the company's focus has shifted over the years from being a single-player-focused studio to an organization that has evolved into something so much more.
When we started out we were a single-player video game company that could have been really successful just doing Half-Life sequel after Half-Life sequel, but we collectively said let's try to make multiplayer games even though there's never been a commercial successful multiplayer game.
Then we tried to do Steam. There were a bunch of people internally who thought Steam was a really bad idea, but what they didn't think was that they would tell the people who were working on Steam what to do with their time. They were like "that's what you want to do with your time, that's fine, but we're going to spend our time working on Half-Life 2. We think you're kind of wasting your time, but it's your time to waste."
Ever since Steam took off it has been one of the leading platforms in digital content. Building upon this and continuing to evolve is clearly what is most important now at the company, so development on a game like Half-Life 3 is most likely not much of a priority. That said, Valve is still listening to the fans.
We definitely in a sense have an army of customers who are always helping us stay honest…We've essentially crowd-sourced supervision of a lot of these decisions to our customers and it works way better than almost any other system we could design. They're rabid, they're passionate, and there are a lot of them.
Do you think we'll ever see Half-Life 3 at this point, or should we just move on with our lives and enjoy what the company is doing with Steam? Comment below and share your thoughts.
