Downfall of Valve (It won't come)

Intro

Since the new leak of Valve’s upcoming game, “Deadlock”, many fans agree that from the leaks of the game, it’s not looking promising at all. The idea of the game feels and looks gimmicky, it’s too cluttered, and it’s not as groundbreaking coming from a company that sets the ball rolling in the video game industry.

Valve is the development team behind revolutionary games such has: Half-Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead, Counter-Strike, and most importantly for this article, Team Fortress; specifically its 2nd version. After a certain point in, I’d say around 2018, Valve somewhat changed in how they work.

No longer did they develop video games, they shifted focus on software & hardware. “polishing up” steam ⁽¹⁾, the steam deck (probably to fuck around with Nintendo and their crappy handheld which they dominated the market on) and Proton (to make the steam deck have games, unlike other consoles). It was weird what they were trying to do, but fans of theirs really did not care, continuing to really dickride the company like as if Gaben would give away profile levels so people could add more hentai to their Steam profile.

Artifact

After the release of their shitty take on Heartstone, called “Artifact” in 2018, Valve riders realized that Valve had really lost their touch with their fan-base, and really started focusing on milking them as much as possible. As if they weren’t making enough money with CS:GO crates, TF2, and their 30% tax on video game sales from companies putting their game on Steam, their monopoly game store & social media platform.

2018 until now has marked the enshittification of the company, as mentioned before with the release of Artifact, there was another sign that Valve was being turned into a money grab.

Team Fortress 2

Team Fortress 2, was a massive hit in the industry, both due to its quite fun gameplay as both a competitive and casual game, its art direction, such as voice lines, character design, game lore, and other big & small details that just made the game what it is.

Team Fortress 2’s last major update was “Jungle Inferno 2017”, released in.. 2017. The details of the update don’t really matter here, what matters is the “bot crisis”. Early 2020, the game started slowly becoming unplayable due to official servers being filled with fake accounts made to specifically ruin the experience, either by playing loud noise and music through voice chat, filling the game chat with copypastas and spam, by vote-kicking legit players, and by the bots themselves becoming unkillable due to the usage of aimbot software that made them in a way unkillable. You can read up more about these bots on the wikipedia page of Team Fortress 2.

Protest

TF2’s community was of course outraged due to the state of the game, and began a quite peaceful protest on Twitter with the hashtag “#SaveTF2”. Valve’s response was:
“TF2 community, we hear you! We love this game and know you do, too. We see how large this issue has become and are working to improve things.”, and a couple of small patches that drastically lowered the amount of bots. January 2024, there was a resurface of bots. Twitter this time starting on June 3rd, protesting with #FixTF2, and an online petition.

State of their other titles

⁽¹⁾ Steam made it more difficult for me to game on my old computer once they removed the “—no-browser” launch option with the latest redesign, forcing Electron (Chromium, aka. The devil in software form), everywhere on the client.

Counter-Strike 2 is in shambles, thank god it’s not called CS:GO2 cause it’s nothing like Global Offensive, just CS trying to imitate the feel of a modern game with old-school shooting mechanics (which just does not work). Game freezes trying to load assets, even after 2 years in development, half of the game-modes are missing, 128-tick is disabled, sub-tick makes me die even after I hide from the enemy. The game just has a feel as if I downloaded a bootleg version.

DOTA2, I’ll be real I have never touched the game, it’s 50GB and I like League of Legends already, I don’t want to change MOBAs.

Half Life 3, can I even joke about this? 20 years and it’s not out yet? Maybe it’s because all their writers have quit the company...

(Deadlock) The leaked game also looks quite promising on making Valve self-destruct as a company and just start shitting out cash grabs, I’m quite excited about that.

My opinion

Here’s my opinion on the matter. Valve sucks. While I understand the TF2 fanbase and its outrage, about the game, after all; it is a really fun game, Valve doesn’t own you an update. As the billionaire company that they are, they have no monetary incentive to continue working on this game. In other words, Valve doesn’t give a flying fuck!! They haven’t done a major update for 7 years, have they?

A hashtag and a petition won’t change anything. That’s reality. Valve is doomed since they started making cash from Steam and CS:GO / TF2 lootboxes.

Boycott Valve?

What may bring change is a full boycott. Remove Steam from your startup programs, don’t play any games from Steam, and whatever game you want to play that requires Steam, pirate it! After all if you’ve bought the game, morally you paid for it and can download a cracked version of it without feeling guilt of developers not getting money. (You should feel guilt anyway cause half of your money went to Valve and not the game company ;-;).

Reminder to ground yourself and that companies are not your friends. You can’t have, or rather, shouldn’t have parasocial relationships with billionaire companies.