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Comment by benbristow | Hacker News Reader

Nobody asked for a Valve card game.

We're all waiting for a '3' of any of their franchises.

"Nobody asked for" is an unproductive meme that gets parroted all too often. No one asked for Half-Life or Portal or DotA or even MtG either.

DotA was a well established Warcraft 3 custom game with the same name before Valve copied it.

Right, DotA was a mod no one asked for.

Portal was actually a similar thing. It started as a student game called Narbacular Drop. Valve hired that team, who turned the concept into Portal.

Likewise they hired Icefrog from DotA to work on DotA 2.

That's a good strategy.

It's an excellent strategy. To add to your examples: Team Fortress was originally a Quake mod, and Valve hired its creators to head Team Fortress 2's development. Counter-Strike was originally a Half-Life mod before Valve bought the rights and made CS:S, then CS:GO.

Nobody asked for the '1' of their franchises. It worked out well tho.

I get the point, and it is true to an extent that the best products/games are ones that people didn't even know they wanted (the original ipod being a good example), but this faith in valve is misplaced at this point. half life was an incredible achievement, but it was released over twenty years ago. the last great original title (imo) created by valve was left 4 dead, released over a decade ago. I definitely like steam better than any of the other distribution platforms, but in terms of actual games, they haven't done much worth talking about in the last ten years; they're just playing out the endgame on their old IP.

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