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Comment by jjcm | Hacker News Reader

A non-trivial amount of their ARR is still from Valve-made games. Counterstrike still nets a bit over 1b per year from just case unboxings, and Dota is in the hundreds of millions. I wouldn't call 8-10% a margin of error.

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Those are maintenance + loot box on existing games. Sure, it still takes art and craft, but not the same kind of development work.

Valve is still working on new things. See this section, specifically the bottom.

https://box2d.org/posts/2026/06/announcing-box3d/#valve-to-t...

So not games.

Try reading between the lines. Why would Valve be developing a new game physics engine internally?

Valve switched existing games to Rubikon to avoid paying licensing fees for their former physics engine.

Yes but it's not just Rubikon anymore. They are working on a new physics engine called Ragnarok. I highly doubt they're making a whole new physics engine just for their existing games because Rubikon is working fine there.

Counter Strike 2 is a 14 year old game. DOTA2 is a 13 year old game.

Yes I know Valve makes money selling games. They don't make games.

While it can be disregarded just as major update CS2 is formally 2023.

Dota is live service game, getting major patches each year. Patch notes for version released 3 months ago: https://liquipedia.net/dota2/Version_7.41 I don't think there's any reason for Dota 3, ever. Any change could be just a patch.

Both of those games are live services games. They're not just getting some occasional bug fixes, they get big content updates.

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