They obviously don't. Look at TF2, they refuse to say it's dead but it hasn't received a proper update in a year. Instead, they spread a gambling model across all their current games and now sit and collect profits. Heck, even those "steam boxes" which were supposed to make PC the "final gaming platform" fell way short. Valve is an e-commerce company with a game development side business now and frankly, their recent output hasn't been good...

Not fair man. Just because they don't manage to do everything don't mean they don't do their best.

As a dota fan, I can tell you that they are doing a LOT of things in there.

They have limited number of devs and designers and so many projects. Just maintaining the steam infra is madness.

Look at blizzard, and see how often they release stuff.

Good things take a lot of resources.

This isn't a defense but the TF2 team is only about like 7 dedicated people last I heard? There's artists and what not shared between teams who I'm not including in that tally though. Valve News Network talked about it once.

Apparently the quality manifests itself as a F2P MOBA and/or a F2P card game. What's next? F2P Pahcinko machine? Slot machine?

Yeah and that F2P MOBA is one of the most beloved, polished, and competitive games around. I don't understand the comparison to a slot machine.

I can't speak to the F2P card game because it does not exist yet.

The issue with DOTA is that its audience is self-limiting. You're locking 5 strangers together in an hour long game where failure is heavily, heavily punished and you're penalized for leaving early.

Where are the games for those of us who loved Half-Life and Portal? The last thing I want to do at the end of a long day is be yelled at by college kids and teenagers for an hour.

Sure, DotA 2 is a rare F2P MOBA that's fair. I mean, I find most of hero kinda meh, but I do appreciate their business model.

But a Card game based on DotA can only mean one thing:

- A F2P game. I can't imagine there being a different model

- A collectible card game. They won't innovate here.

- Buyable cosmetic, but not community made. It's not like they'll allow visual clutter on your cards.

The trading cards/badges in Steam are basically an F2P Pachinko/slot machine already.

Designers' perceptions of quality can get out of synch with what users actually want. Sometimes we assume that people want things that are actually negotiable.

More concretely, would HL fans rather have a HL3 that is merely a game, flaws and all, or are they waiting for the second coming (third?)?

If HL3 gets made, is a game with warts and all, that's not necessary a bad thing. It may be that the dev team is holding themselves to an impossible standard rather than users holding them to an impossible standard.