Where Are All the Valve Games?--half-life-3-left-4-dead-3

Check under your bed. Are there any Valve games there? What about in the cracks between the cushions of your sofa — can you spot any there? A rogue Portal 3, perhaps, peaking out in between all the loose change and lint? No? Well, you're not alone.

People have been looking for a new Valve game for years now. The developer's last full game release was Dota 2, and aside from a virtual reality Portal experience in the form of The Lab and a couple of collaborations with their existing properties such as the Left 4 Dead: Survivors arcade game, they've opted to take a backseat and instead focus upon their Steam platform.

Who can really blame them? Valve makes roughly 30% from every game sold on Steam, and with SteamSpy estimating that 378,400,000 games made its way into Steam users' libraries in 2016, that's a whole lot of moolah. In 2014, market data compiled by SuperData estimated that Valve had raked in $730 million throughout the course of the year, and with Steam having only increased in popularity since then, it's anyone's guess as to how much they're pulling in right now. While Valve isn't a publicly traded company, meaning their net worth is private information, Forbes estimates that its founder Gabe Newell has a net worth of $4.1 billion, making him the 134th richest person in the world. For context, this puts him ahead of the likes of Donald Trump, Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey.

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We're constantly receiving games from developers because they need to keep making them in order to keep the lights on. Even mega corporations such as EA are reliant upon the constant financial success of their releases in order to stay successful, with them not afforded the opportunity to rest on their laurels, even if the mega bucks they've garnered over the years lets them release a few duff games every now and again. Valve, on the other hand, have ensured that their financial situation does allow them to do so, though it doesn't in any way mean that they're simply sitting back and taking it easy.