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>CS:GO and DotA 2, which are both some of the most played games in the world?

Yes, I mean exactly those games, which are neither new nor ground breaking, and which were originally authored by outside firms/contractors, not valve. Since then, most of Valve's additions to the games are in the form of monetization.

If you didn't notice the news articles, they even laid off almost all the people responsible for HL2 and its episodes, including the writer.

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It's a stretch to say DOTA 2 or CS:GO were initially made by outside firms. Sure they're based on community mods, but so is PUBG, TF2, all the autochess games. Outside of Half-Life and L4D (which was originally a Turtlerock game) all of Valve's games are polished commercial versions of mods or student games (Portal series), but with the exception of Counterstrike all of the originals were good ideas with fatal execution flaws.

Valve has also released DOTA Underlords and Artifact in the two years. With HLA and Underlords Valve is actually releasing two games this year.

CS:GO was literally made by an outside dev (Hidden Path). It's definitely unfair to say Valve's only additions have been monetization though, it seems Valve took over development pretty soon after the initial release and there have been a lot of major updates since then.

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