This is an editorial by Lilgreenman discussing the community’s reactions to Gabe Newell’s most recent comments about the future of the Half-Life series that were made at GDC 2015 as part of the first episode of the GameSlice podcast hosted by Geoff Keighley. All views expressed in this article are his own.

A little over four years ago, we wrote an article to announce that version 2.0 of a little community-made ‘mod’ going by the name ‘Half Life 2: Update‘ had been released in response to Valve’s infamous 2010 Mac update that brought a weak implementation of HDR (High Dynamic Range) to Half Life 2 and an insane number of crippling bugs.

Half Life 2: Update fixed many of those bugs – unofficially – and enhanced many of the HDR effects in the vanilla game and just today, the lead developer Filip Victor has announced that the third and final iteration will be released for free on Steam this Friday, March 27th.

Things haven’t been the same since. The doctors say my addiction to Team Fortress 2 (and by extension, my addiction to hats) may never be cured.