Oh, yeah, there was a time when Valve teamed up with EA to make console ports back when Steam was a tenth of the userbase of the PS2 or a half of the 360, because business is business. You'll note they've stopped doing that. I mean, it's hard to tell because they don't make many games anymore, but there were no console ports for DOTA, CS2, Deadlock or Artifact, and no Meta or Playstation VR ports for Alyx, either. They sure seem less bothered by exclusives than their fanbase these days.

And no, it's not because they're competitive or online games. Their last set of ports was CS: GO.

My question about Valve buying mods is why it's fine for first party games to be exclusives but not third party games. Insomniac wasn't owned by Sony for most of their existence, but most of their games were platform exclusives, first for Sony consoles, then, once, for Xbox. Was it better or worse for their output to be exclusive before or after the purchase?

And the same goes to Valve onboarding mod teams as fully owned teams, although just as an extension there. Team Fortress and DOTA do not originate at Valve, or as proprietary or exclusive games. Is that fine?

I mean, I think it's fine. One could say it's iffy to use free labor from modders as a recruitment tool, but mods are mods and mods are cool, so hiring mod teams is a smart way to hire game teams. But I also think that hiring a third party dev team to make a game for your platform is a perfectly fine way to fill your platform with content, so who knows where you guys are drawing the line for what you consider acceptable ways to fund a game's development.