I wouldn't call less than a year "ages". CS:GO released in August last year. Dota 2 is releasing this summer. Plus regular updates for existing games and the Steam community.

Look at your signature. Assassin's Creed and Mass Effect, two franchises ruined by mediocre rushed sequels. I like Valve the way they are and hope they don't change.

Both kickstarter projects combined wouldn't even take a third of the staff they have... Massive chalice is a different team entirely to Broken age with a different manager/director. They have at least 4 seperate dev teams working on different projects 2 of which are funded by the Indie Fund and anoth Dropchord which is funded by Steven Dengler the investor who also funded the PC ports of DF's games. Putting 65+ people on Broken Age would use up the budget in a few months and kill the company.

Do people really care about Valve games beyond Half Life 3? ME certainly did not suffer from being rushed, I have no complaints about that series at all. I get that some AC games were rushed, but they are still some of my favourite games each year and their problems are poor design more than being rushed

DF is one of the most overrated indie companies of recent years. I backed Broken Age, I'll play it, I have it in my sig, I still have hope that it could be a great game (it comes from the creator/writer of Grim Fandango and co-designer of Day of the Tentacle after all), but Tim Schafer's company hasn't delivered a great game since Psychonauts (2005), just a few decent ones. Ron Gilbert's mediocre The Cave was the latest example.

In the meantime I play quality point&click adventure games from companies like Daedalic Entertainment (for comparison: p&c games by Daedalic - a smaller company than DF - released and in development since DF's Broken Age Kickstarter campaign: Deponia, The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav, Chaos on Deponia, The Night of the Rabbit, Goodbye Deponia/rel. autumn 2013, The Dark Eye: Memoria/rel. late 2013 or early 2014).

Let's see if the other two holy-grail-of-pointnclick companies - Revolution Software (Broken Sword 5; KS money $ 770.000) and Funcom (Dreamfall Chapters; KS money $ 1.5 mio) - handle the comfortable situation their devoted fans put them in better.

I think Valve are done making games once Dota's "released". And can anyone really say they created Dota? It's the same exact game.

From wiki, this is their last 9 years. Half Life 2 + episodes. Portal (not made by them), Team Fortress 2 is not a fully fledged game and all their work on it seems to be hats... Left 4 Dead and then a skin pack. Portal 2 is a proper game. CS GO is a remake and DOTA 2 is a MOBA that I really really don't care about.

Basically, very few of those games actually required significant work. They thought about Half Life 3, then got distracted, they seem to be thinking about the steam console, but not really focused.

Naughty Dog has a structure with limited hierarchy, but it still has direction and it has still made great games. There needs to be a balance between order and fluidity to get creative games but with some sort of control and both Valve and Double Fine have failed at that

Add to that the fact that they have ported all those titles to linux this year in the run up to the steam box (Portal 2 is in limited beta, CS:GO is nearing beta for linux)  as well as all thier old pre 2004 software.  

DOTA 2 has the most concurrent players on steam and is a huge success for a pre-release game.  CS:GO is a sequal not a remake, huge difference from CS:Source.  L4D2 was great.

Valve is moving mountains recently, and has more irons in the fire.  The rumour is something new in the half life series this September (they have been dropping clues around in classic Valve crypto style).  They have source 2 in production and will probably reveal HL3 when source2 and steambox are ready to launch.

So despite them storming past their original goal they still managed to piss it all away.

No they are focussing on the online F2P market with DOTA 2 and TF2 because that's where the money is at this time.

It's better than constantly making bloated AAA titles and making losses every year.

Valve are not directionless.  Gabe Newell knows where he wants the company to be,,you should go watch his DICE speech.

If Valve don't want to make standout titles any more (and prefer to get money from F2P and from being a storefront), they should be upfront about it. Get Reddit and VGC and GAF to shut up about how awesome Valve is as a dev, because those days are behind them.