The reason behind cancelation of the Companion Cube skin for Steam Machines is that the company didn't even ask Valve's permission before spending half a year prototyping dozens of iterations 😭
A fully playable browser version of Half-Life 2 has just been released to the public. You don't need to download anything, just open the site and play! The webport was created by Slqnt and 98006 in just three months!
I remember watching pc building guides 5 or 6 years ago and RAM was THE cheapest part, by far. Everyone was like "yeah you can get away with 16 but you might as well get 32 if you can fit them because it's like 20 bucks for a pair of these things" now we live in hell.
It's pretty clear why this happened. Valve bit off more than they could chew. They likely thought an MVM update would simply amount to another copy and paste job from the community workshop (hence the 2 month deadline for new maps, and a tease for a Halloween release of...something in the blogpost). I have eyes. It says this.
Then, it didn't happen. Why? Uh oh, all the new flashy maps uploaded to the workshop had no robot waves- there was no mechanism by which to ship waves (lol), because valve never anticipated for the community to make this type of content for them! Plus, they quickly realized they would have to actually playtest everything, especially if they're planning on monetizing whatever they ship. This fact alone contradicts the update model they've been upholding. If the past decade has shown me anything, Valve only manages below the bare minimum for TF2. They certainly don't playtest anything. There's hardly content curation. Dump and go.
Now we're waiting indefinitely for what I truly think might amount to another heavy update: I think they just dropped it. It'll never come. It quickly become too much work, and the radio silence will eventually drag us out into compliance (as they did with bots, a lack of major updates, etc. etc.).
Pessimistic and cynical, I know. I would love an amazing, competent TF2 update, like we used to receive. I'm hope I'm wrong, I'll happily eat crow if I am! But if the last decade has shown me anything, I'm not holding my breath.
In the age of AI slop, some of us are still making things by hand, I promise ❤️ Octocat for the new GitHub Copilot App was modeled, rigged, and animated in Blender...