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This was back when HL Alyx was announced. TF2 was forsaken long ago. Employees at Valve basically need to choose to work on a project, and TF2 has been lucky to have any employees working on it full-time over the past decade. The culture is driven by whatever the most influential employees think is cool at the moment. It's why they were focused heavily on VR for a while, only to switch heavily to the steam deck and leave most of their VR stuff in limbo.

Valve is a strange company with a company culture that strives to be anarchistic and employee led. My understanding is that Gabe Newell and other senior executives with majority stake in the company believe in this strategy and try to maintain it as much as possible. This flat organization isn't truly anarchistic, as the ownership is practically in the hands of a few executives and informal hierarchy exists. However, they can be hands off thanks to Steam. So long as the cash cow is maintained, delivering products isn't an issue.

Some blame the flat organization for Valve's inadequacies. They barely release products, poorly support many existing products, and take a long time to ever release anything. However, I personally think the flat organization isn't the source of the problem. They're more willing to change than Rockstar and Bethesda, who struck gold in GTA Online and Skyrim, only for their releases to slow to a crawl and not innovate from what worked in the early 2010s. Google doesn't need flat organization to bungle services and drop support, leaving customers in the lurch. The money printer itself kills innovation.

They may have abandoned TF2 to rot, but I think other companies would have done the same or worse. An old game that still makes money through cosmetics might get butchered harder by a more focused company. The only way things could be better would be if there were no cosmetics and the only support was from fans. The fact that money is still made leaves it in limbo.

No, Half-life: Source 2