The Valve that once crammed into an overstuffed Los Angeles Convention Centre with other developers at E3 2003, fresh-faced and ready to announce its new game, isa relic of the past. Steam fills its coffers enough now that it can do things its own way, leading to the infamous ‘moving desks’ mentality that sees projects cancelled on a whim, or the fact that it announces new games with as much fanfare as Barney ‘about that beer I owe ya’ Calhoun.
It announcedCounter-Strike 2in a tweet, accompanied by a limited test to tie players over in the months leading up to its official release.Deadlock, its unique splice of MOBA and hero shooter, was gradually rolled out through an invite-only alpha, reachingan all-time peak of over 40,000 playersbefore Valve uttered a word about it. And when it did, the ‘announcement’ was a Steam page and Discord ping.
Even the Steam Deck, a revolutionary PC handheld, was dropped randomly on social media.
Half-Life: Alyx, the first game in the series in 13 years, wasalsoannounced in a tweet. There was no build-up, just a random post on a random Thursday, weeks before The Game Awards (which Valve cancelled its appearance at mere hours before airing). The last major Valve announcement was for the Dota 2 card game, Artifact, and we all know how that went: a video of the audience sighing has over one million views.
Half-Life 3 Is Getting Shadowdropped, Right?
At this point, Half-Life 3 is an open secret. References to ‘HLX’ are found in every Source 2 update, from Dota 2 to Deadlock, anda Valve artist even openly admitted to being in “the room where Half-Life 3 is made”. Leakers like Gabe Insider meanwhile claim to be privy to finer details of the narrative. We know it’s in development, and all signs point to it being in the late stages (with reporters like Tyler McVicker saying that it could release"any day"now), so where’s the announcement?
Any other studio would have released a CGI teaser and maybe even a brief gameplay trailer by now, but it’s hard to blame Valve for keeping its cards close to its chest. Half-Life 2 was revealed at E3, with the promise that it’d be in our hands later that year, only for it to be delayed shortly after. Backlash can at least be weathered when you know the final product will be worth the wait, but then came one of the largest hacking scandals in the industry, as Half-Life 2’s source code was stolen and leaked online. It would take over a year for the game to finally hit store shelves as the team weathered critically low morale and unending controversy.
Jump ahead 20 years, and Valve now has the unending cash cow that is Steam, so it doesn’t need to keep releasing new games to stay profitable, meaning that these early reveals are completely unnecessary. Especially given the risk of similar delays, such as when Alyx underwent rewrites for a year — a long-awaited new entry in the Half-Life series being pushed back that far could’ve been a disaster, but since Valve waited to reveal the game when it was ready, it circumnavigated that backlash entirely.
It’s not hard to imagine Half-Life 3 following suit, being announced and released shortly after. But given the trend set by Valve’s latest games, it could also appear on Steam’s front page without warning. Counter-Strike 2 was practically shadowdropped with its limited test, and Deadlock popped up out of nowhere with its alpha. It’s not like Half-Life 3 is a VR game, either, so Valve doesn’t need to give players room to save up for an expensive headset this time.
If you’ve got Steam downloaded and are already looking at the big banner, scanning back and forth between it and the date to ensure that it isn’t April 1, then you’re able to probably run it. Why waste money on marketing when word-of-mouth will do its thing?
Mike Shapiro Might’ve Been Teasing A Half-Life 3 Shadowdrop
What really sold me on this idea is what Mike Shapiro said in his New Year’s tweet, wherehe slipped back into the voice of G-Man to drop an incredibly cryptic teaser: “Another year already, good to see and hear from so many of you. May the next quarter century deliver as many unexpected surprises, hm? As did the millennium’s first. Then again, time is fluid, like music. See you in the new year.”
He captioned the post, “#Valve #Halflife #GMan #2025”, and the community descended on every word like a headcrab latching its claws around a poor civvy,convinced that this was the start of a Portal 2-esque ARG. But, after stumbling down a rabbit hole while trying to crack the meaning behind the meaningless ‘197’, they hit a dead end and gave up. ARG or not, though, there’s clearly something to this post.
We allexpectHalf-Life 3. Like I said, it’s an open secret. The unexpected surprise would be if Valve released it out of nowhere. So, maybe that’s what Shapiro was teasing: a shadowdrop. It would be a bizarre way to follow up on a nearly two-decade-old cliffhanger, but all you need to do is look at Deadlock to see why Valve might do it.
An untested IP in an untested genre skyrocketed to the top of the Steam charts without so much as an announcement, reaching over 170,000 players as Valve let the hubbub among its fledgling community do the legwork. Now imagine a flagship series fans have been hungering to see the return of for 20 years. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next month, but one day soon, I bet we all open Steam to one helluva surprise.
