The reason why Valve does all this cool shit is because it's a private company and not publicly traded. It owes nothing to no one.
As soon as a company goes public, it owes its shareholders its profits and has an obligation to make as much as possible and use whatever means it can to do so.
Gabe doesn't care. He does what he wants and he knows what his customers want.
This is super true in so many ways. I worked for a private company for several years and about 2 years ago they were bought out by a public company. Things changed real quick lol. The original owners swore they would never sell too. I til they did one day lol
Well, things change. With time I became more wary of people who claim they will "never" or "always" do something. It's not a realistic thing most of the time
Don't forget the part where they're able to do that because they basically own the Windows market so pursuing projects that won't see a RoI in the short term is possible for them but wouldn't be for others.
I put an admittedly low amount of effort into searching (skimmed a couple dozen links or so) for evidence of crimes and came up empty. I'd be curious to see trustworthy sources about this as well.
Re: HL3. It's a particularly infamous example of a game cancelation, and it does suck but studios canceling games happens.
Edit: Excepting antitrust lawsuits. I wasn't surprised to see that and glossed over it, but it does qualify as a crime and I would say is a reasonable accusation. I didn't read more in to it than that, yet.
Edit 2: The TL;DR: of the antitrust lawsuit if you weren't aware (I wasn't) is that Steam is taking a cut of up to 30% which they're arguing is excessive. Game makers don't really have a choice given that Steam is the market leader. Here's a random newer article, more about Gabe having to appear in court, but it covers the basics. https://www.techspot.com/news/100969-gabe-newell-ordered-testify-person-valve-antitrust-lawsuit.html
Hl3 will come out if and when valve comes up with interesting new engine tech. The story of hl1 was the pitch the gravity gun and physics of source was the reason for hl2. If vr had seen mass adoption hl alyx would have been a Main line game or maybe include more post hl2 content.
People don't even know what people want. Gabe knows people expect HL3 to be some godly game and he knows what they make will in all likelihood not live up to that image. Why bother if it will just bring disappointment to everyone? Just save the effort and enjoy the memes.
regardless of Gabe knowing what people want, the point about being privately owned stands. it really is the publicly traded companies that are the problem. at least private ones aren't legally obligated to pursue profits over all else. they have the choice to be evil. they may still make that choice, but public companies can be sued by their investors for being "charitable to customers" instead of maximizing profits.
I've heard that there's been a marked "financialization" of corporations in the last decade or so. More and more companies make more money from leveraging/leasing/whatever rather than actually making a product and selling it to people.
Private companies have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders just the same as public ones. The big difference is that they tend to have far fewer shareholders and they usually all have some personal relationship. So it's less likely to result in a lawsuit.
Gabe apparently owns 50.1% of Valve. I don't know who owns the rest (I'm reading some places that he got divorced, so possibly his ex-wife?), but if they're not happy with how it's being run they could certainly sue. That being said it seems like a money making machine at the moment, so why would you.