> Didn't Valve make the "traditional" buy-once games like Half-Life, Portal, HL-derivatives like Team Fortress/CS?

There's a reason that the slogan "we used to make games, now we make money" has been half-jokingly attributed to Valve. For years, their biggest revenue producers have been their free-to-play games with cosmetic microtransactions such as CS:GO, DOTA2, and TF2. As far as I know, their last "traditional" game was Portal 2 in 2011. Half-Life: Alyx could be argued to have similar production value, but was released as more of an erstwhile "pack-in title" for the Valve Index headset.