They operate wildly different from most other companies. While they have a few tasks assigned to them, they can also just start, move to, or end projects at will. The games they have made were basically made just for fun because enough staff wanted to do them. The reason there hasn’t been a new Half Life entry since Alyx is because only like 2 guys want to do something with it, and that’s not enough.
There’s been a ton of interviews and tour details of their offices (both their current and previous ones) that always made it sound like a pretty dope place to work. But they also have claimed they don’t hire people that haven’t done something. They don’t care if you’ve gone to school and got a degree; you’re more valuable if you have something tangible to show that you’ve actually got some talent.
They wouldn’t operate this way if they didn’t have Steam. These days it’s just a bunch of people taking care of a money printing machine. They get bored and try other stuff sometimes. The problem is that this other stuff won’t make anywhere near what Steam does. The only real work at Valve these days is ensuring they have plan B for when Windows becomes less viable as a platform for them.
That’s not that long in the grand scheme of things. It’s been almost 20 years now since Steam was opened to third parties. Valve stopped most of the game development once Steam got into dominant position.
I mean this is kind of true, but taking care of the money printing machine is kind of what every profitable company does. They definitely still innovate, even if nothing comes close to being as profitable as Steam.
Right now they are making more upstream contributions to the Linux ecosystem than anyone else as well, which is awesome.