Half Life has always been a series where titles are carried by technological innovation which is why we got Alyx instead of 3. Valve has a bad points, namely enabling gambling and not moderating their forums. Also giving in to payment processors demands. But for their development it’s the motto of “if there’s no spark of innovation, we won’t do it” Currently their sparks and innovations go to hardware, boosting Linux gaming and making machine learning based anti cheat instead of kernel based ones. They also still make some games like deadlock which I’m not interested in but still.

Anyways. It’s fair to critique valve for a lot of things but not making a slop HL3 just because it sells is literally the opposite of the thing you originally complained about