

The competitive first-person shooter now has selectable in-game agents, and it appears that the series will have female avatars for the first time, too.Aside from in the Asian markets, where the Counter-Strike Neo and Counter-Strike Online games have all had selectable agents including females. They haven't been interested in anything that they don't think will rake in easy profit through Steam marketplace trading and microtransactions. For most of the last decade, they seem to have been primarily focused on maximizing profits through Steam and little else. I can't say I have complete confidence that Valve will produce a great game at this point. Since then, it's mostly just been content updates for their esports games, a brief VR tech demo, and a much-disliked pay-to-win lootbox card battle game that lost 95% of its player-base within two months and is now down to fewer than 100 concurrent players less than a year after it came out. It's been nearly 9 years since they released Portal 2, their last single-player focused game, and around 8 years since their last multiplayer esports titles DOTA2 and CS:GO came out. How many of the original Half-Life developers even work at Valve anymore? I know a lot of the lead developers left, including the writer of the series.
