Building Steam was a genius business move, it has basically given them an insane amount of income for close to zero effort, I mean the client is insanely janky and has barely been updated from an actual experience point of view in over a decade but it doesn't matter because almost all PC gaming purchases are funneled through it.
Now what this should have done is allow the company to stop caring about profits and being able to relish in building true art to a true un-compromised vision. But something has seriously gone wrong here and the company has struggled to ship close to anything meaty in 16 years.
To put it in perspective lets look at auteur studios held in similar regard as Half-Life.
(I'm ignoring side releases, just focusing on mainline games)
- Half-Life: HL2 2004, HL:A 2020 - Kojima : MGS3 2004, MGS4 2008, MGS5 2014, Death Stranding (worth pointing out his studio was rebuilt from nothing for this too) 2020 - Rockstar : GTA:SA 2004, GTA4 2008, RDR 2010, GTA5 2013, RDR2 2019
If Valve hadn't had steam, the company would not still exist today with that output. If HL:A good, yes. But we put it next to Rockstars output in the same time and it's not even the same league.
Something has seriously gone wrong within Valve and I think the charitable way to frame it is "Oh they just care so much they only release when its perfect" but I'm not really buying that, I feel they have instead of being freed creatively by Steam they have been shacked by it.
Steve Jobs sales and marketing speech comes to mind [0], the people calling the shots are only focused on running a digital videogame Walmart, artists push and push get burned out by not shipping and leave. At the head of it I guess Gabe just doesn't have the passion or care enough about creating art to push for anything else.
Now if you're a big Valve fan what I'm saying might annoy you, but really think for a second. What have you as a Valve fan been denied because the people in the company care more about running a store than making art. What games exist in the reality where Valve never made steam.