That's pretty shaky ground too, even if you can overlook the foundation being closed source, Valve aren't really known for supporting their engines very well beyond their own internal needs. They're not trying to be Epic or Unity.
The most obvious aspect to that is that Source 2 doesn't support consoles. Valve don't need it, so they didn't implement it.
> Valve aren't really known for supporting their engines very well beyond their own internal needs.
Valve has a long history of supporting the modding community and outside users of Source, not sure where you're getting your information from but I don't think they've worked with the Source engine before. One of the biggest and most popular mods of all time was built on Source, and took the world by storm, with pretty big support by Valve through the years as well. Eventually they even bought the whole IP.
That was then, in 2025 they don't have a public Source 2 SDK, nor do they generally license the engine to third parties, S&box being the sole exception. They barely have their toes in the middleware game anymore.
Even when they were more open with their tech it was on the basis of "you can play with the tools we used to make Half Life and if your idea is sufficiently Half Life shaped then it will probably work", not trying to be a general purpose toolkit a la Unity.
There are various internal Valve tools that aren't available in any Valve-published SDK, but are in (accidentally?) within Dino D-Day's, a third party game based on Portal 2's version of Source.
Oh right, that's more reassuring. I guess you'd still have to cut a deal with Valve to use FPs fork commercially though? Which is a wildcard since the licensing terms aren't public as far as I can tell.
It feels like Valve's management changed a few years (decade?) ago. I remember when they were still shipping SDKs and proper mod support, even for their multiplayer games. Today they are just killing everything that could divert revenue from their cash cow CS2 and shipping a half baked js-based scripting engine for their maps. (And in the meanwhile they kill fan projects like CS:Legacy, which is a whole game and not even a mod, with their army of lawyers. I don't think stuff like this would have happened 13+ years ago).
All of their games (Dota 2, CS, and the other ones they hardly maintain anymore) are basically just passion projects at this point, lingering on from a bygone age when they were a game development company.
Their most recent title, Half-Life: Alyx, probably only got greenlit because someone internally was able to convince leadership that it would help sell VR headsets.
That's pretty shaky ground too, even if you can overlook the foundation being closed source, Valve aren't really known for supporting their engines very well beyond their own internal needs. They're not trying to be Epic or Unity.
The most obvious aspect to that is that Source 2 doesn't support consoles. Valve don't need it, so they didn't implement it.
> Valve aren't really known for supporting their engines very well beyond their own internal needs.
Valve has a long history of supporting the modding community and outside users of Source, not sure where you're getting your information from but I don't think they've worked with the Source engine before. One of the biggest and most popular mods of all time was built on Source, and took the world by storm, with pretty big support by Valve through the years as well. Eventually they even bought the whole IP.
That was then, in 2025 they don't have a public Source 2 SDK, nor do they generally license the engine to third parties, S&box being the sole exception. They barely have their toes in the middleware game anymore.
Even when they were more open with their tech it was on the basis of "you can play with the tools we used to make Half Life and if your idea is sufficiently Half Life shaped then it will probably work", not trying to be a general purpose toolkit a la Unity.
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There are various internal Valve tools that aren't available in any Valve-published SDK, but are in (accidentally?) within Dino D-Day's, a third party game based on Portal 2's version of Source.
> Valve aren't really known for supporting their engines very well beyond their own internal needs
They don't need to. S&box uses a fork of Source 2 that is maintained by Facepunch, with Valve's upstream changes merged in as needed.
Oh right, that's more reassuring. I guess you'd still have to cut a deal with Valve to use FPs fork commercially though? Which is a wildcard since the licensing terms aren't public as far as I can tell.
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Dude. People are playing and making Gmod and HL2 mods and maps to this day. How many 20+yo game engines can say the same?
Originally people thought the Source 2 sdk, was going to be released with Half Life Alyx, but it never materialized.
It feels like Valve's management changed a few years (decade?) ago. I remember when they were still shipping SDKs and proper mod support, even for their multiplayer games. Today they are just killing everything that could divert revenue from their cash cow CS2 and shipping a half baked js-based scripting engine for their maps. (And in the meanwhile they kill fan projects like CS:Legacy, which is a whole game and not even a mod, with their army of lawyers. I don't think stuff like this would have happened 13+ years ago).
Valve's cash cow is Steam.
All of their games (Dota 2, CS, and the other ones they hardly maintain anymore) are basically just passion projects at this point, lingering on from a bygone age when they were a game development company.
Their most recent title, Half-Life: Alyx, probably only got greenlit because someone internally was able to convince leadership that it would help sell VR headsets.
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They just opened up the source to TF2 with an SDK not too long ago. Explicitly for modding and community driven development.
https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=238809