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Valve Inks Deal With Lionsgate Adding Over 100 Movie Titles To Steam Platform (hothardware.com)
MojoKid quotes a report from HotHardware: Valve took a major step in growing its Steam digital distribution platform today by adding movie rentals to the mix. The addition of movies to Steam's catalog is a first, and it was made possible through a deal with Lionsgate Entertainment that immediately fleshes out the service with more than 100 flicks. Steam is currently the biggest digital distribution platform for games, and while it has a long way to go before it can claim the same for movies, there's little doubt Valve wants to take it there. In a press release announcing the deal, Valve said Lionsgate was "one of the first major studios to license films" for streaming on Steam, which hints that it's attempting to lure other studios as well. You can view the entire catalog here.
Half-Life 3 will never happen. It's not in Valve's commercial interest any more.
Valve isn't really a games developer any more; it's a platform holder. Remember that, while the precise arrangements sometimes vary per customer, it generally takes around 30% of the value of each sale on Steam. It's putting very little money into the development of those games (hosting/bandwidth costs for the store and some multiplayer/social backend for the majority of games), but is taking a huge amount of revenue from them. By contrast, when it develops and sells its own games, it needs to front up the costs and take a lot more of the commercial risk.
This is broadly similar to how things work on the consoles. Sony and MS take the costs of hardware development and fund first and third-party exclusive titles to grow the installed base, but their real income comes from the licensing fees. Nintendo still tries to make the first-party model work, but has been struggling with it since the launch of the 3DS.
Valve has a further advantage over Sony and MS in that its platform is an evolutionary one, rather than one with major hardware shifts once or twice a decade. Once the installed base for Steam was there, Valve didn't really need to put much effort into growing it through first-party development. It therefore focusses its first-party development on new markets; see its recent investment in VR via the HTC Vive and its software suite.
But even if Valve doesn't need to make Half-Life 3, is there a reason why it shouldn't do so anyway, given the game would almost certainly be profitable?
Actually, yes...
Steam's success is predicated on wide participation by developers and publishers. The one thing that could really hurt Steam would be for a critical mass of major publishers to withdraw. EA have already taken their ball and gone home to Origin. Ubisoft has tried to draw people over to uPlay, but has had less success so far and still tends to depend on Steam for the backend of some of its games. But if Valve wants to keep the major publishers on board, then it can't afford to compete with them directly. Most of Valve's output since HL2 has taken the form of experimental or niche titles, like Portal or Left 4 Dead. For Valve to put out a major AAA shooter would send worrying signals to a lot of its major parties. So it won't.
At this point, the only real prospect for seeing HL3 would be if Valve sold the rights to the series to a third party, which is itself vanishingly unlikely.