Last month I reported on Valve's Steam Awards, which fans used to tell the company to make Half-Life 3.
Well, Valve has just announced the nominations, and of course it didn't listen.
In November, Steam launched a new user-powered awards system that let people nominate games. Valve created a number of award categories, such as the "Best Use Of A Farm Animal" award. But it also included a wild card, the "We Didn't Think Of Everything" award, which tasked the audience with writing in and voting for their own category.
Half-Life 2: Episode 2 came out nine years ago.
It was this category people used to tell Valve to pull its finger out and make the sequel everyone's been waiting years for. Users of the Half-Life subreddit visited the Half-Life 2: Episode 2 page on Steam en masse to nominate it for the "Game That Deserves A Sequel" award.
No-one thought the mini online movement would actually brute force Valve into action, or even spark some kind of comment. But some thought Valve might have at least acknowledged the thing.
It did not.
There isn't a single mention of Half-Life anywhere in the nominations list, not even in one of Valve's own categories. Half-Life didn't make the cut with the "Test of Time" award and that's just silly.
Valve even expanded the wild card category from one award into four, because the response "was so overwhelming that one category didn't seem enough". So, we have the "Boom Boom" award, the "Love/Hate Relationship" award, the "Sit Back and Relax" award and the "Better With Friends" award. But no the "Game That Deserves A Sequel" award.
That's just cold, Valve.
