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Why should Valve give up their leverage. They actively pick and choose who they license the engine to.

Realistically there isn't really any commercial value left in it though. While there were some notable unique games made with it (Titanfall 1 & 2, E.Y.E, The Stanley Parable, etc), these were made over a decade ago and the majority of games made with it are reworks/mods/adaptations of Half-Life related material.

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/List_of_third-party...

> there isn't really any commercial value left in it though

I wonder why it never went mainstream. The Unreal engine went on to power a massive number of games. The Half-Life engines birthed a lot of mods, but wasn't used by many full games.

Unreal won because they invested in a whole ecosystem of tools to build interactive media and the community to support it. Only unity really compares (and I'm not sure how true even that is these days).

The Source engine isn't a blank slate engine like Unity. It's more like having unlimited power and permission to mod HL2. They just give you the HL2 code and say go nuts.

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