/!\ This is a reupload from my tumblr with edits made to make it just read better.

Alright. So, I don’t want this to be “GENERIC VALVE COMPLAINT POST#345256″, as I think I have a somewhat different opinion on Valve than most “Valve Haters”. Hell, I don’t even think of myself as a Valve Hater. I wouldn’t consider myself one. Also, I sorta want practice for writing stuff, so hopefully I can use this blog for actual blog things.

Valve is a shadow of its former self. It still retains its name, but it isn’t the same company that we once knew. Even if they really try to be what they used to be, it won’t make up for the last 10 or so years. I’ve played so many of their games, I own the Valve Complete Pack for crying out loud! I played TF2 endlessly, I loved the Portal games (Portal 1 is better than 2 fight me), and failed horribly in Dota 2! I even tried to make SFM animations, I tried to make maps, items, you freaking name it! So seeing Valve as it currently is just hurts. Let me get this out of way before I start complaining more: Half-Life 3, if it ever came out, would most likely be the most damaging thing to Valve possible. So many years have passed, it is literally impossible to live up to the hype. The internet is the internet, meaning no matter what, the internet will complain if it doesn’t match their “standards”. Even then, the ending to the game will most likely leave off of a cliffhanger like Half-Life 1 did. Yeah, remember that? Valve had no idea if HL1 was going to be successful, and they still made it a cliffhanger. For all we know, a majority of Valve might be okay with HL2′s current ending. It just hurts more because of HL2′s character development. HL1 didn’t have a ton of character development to it, so the cliffhanger ending didn’t hurt nearly as much. HL2 stabs you multiple times in the feels and expects you leave the cinema satisfied to some extent. If Valve is smart, they will never release Half-Life 3, unless they truly trust that it will be the game everyone wanted, which I highly doubt will ever happen. As for Portal, I don’t know why so many people want a Portal 3. I mean, Portal was good, but like, we got an ending. An actual satisfying ending. The co-op ending however, probably just exists so Valve could make spin-offs without hurting the lore. Counter-Strike is…something I actually couldn’t really get into. I can’t really comment on this one much. I did play a fair amount of CS:GO, but it didn’t really grab me I guess. Team Fortress 2 on the other hand…as of writing this I have 976 hours clocked into TF2. I know for a lot of people that might just be "noob hours", but I still freaking love that game, even with all its flaws. The absence of content of the game is worrying, but I do know the team is very small, like I think it was said to be around 6-10 people or something. The community for TF2 is still super active, so it’s not dead, not even close. Community-made content is really helping it survive, without it, TF2 would have died years ago. The problem lies in the fact that I still worry. I still worry that one day updates for TF2 will just stop. I worry Valve will make a bad decision and everything will go down the drain. Artifact hasn’t been handled the best, so my worries about Valve just sorta skyrocketed. I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t want to care anymore. I don’t want to care about Valve anymore. It’s freaking stressful and makes me so sad when I see what they’re doing, or, I guess not doing. They barely communicate with their community, especially putting F2P elements in their paid games. I can’t support that. I really can’t. It feels like Valve is getting greedier and greedier sometimes, it really does. The asset flips and general garbage that ends up on Steam showed they don’t care what gets put on Steam as long as they make money. Valve has given me some of the best video game experiences I’ve ever had, and I’ll always have those memories. So, what’s the point of hoping they’ll do it again?

I really want to support them, they made some amazing games, but all I see is them going downhill at a pretty rapid pace. Artifact really sped it up. Also, if you’re wondering if I’ve played Artifact or not, the answer is no. The main reasoning being the fact that I don’t have much interest in card games, and the whole F2P model in a paid game doesn’t really grab me.

TLDR; i’m breaking up with you, valve. but i’m keeping the action figures because they are really cool.

Have a nice day, and thank you for reading (and excuse typos, I’m still trying to get the hang of this whole blog thing and I tend to think faster than I can type lol).

December 6th, 2018 EDIT: Ok so I guess CSGO is Free-to-Play now!?! I really didn't see that coming. Huh.