Valve is the same as everyone else, stop kidding yourself
Nope, Valve had and has a very different philosophy from most other developers right from the start. For Halflife Valve hired modders as well as developers. Which I'm pretty sure wasn't done before, at least for a AAA game. Also unlike other developers that closed off content, Valve openly allowed people to alter the engine. Which lead to Counterstrike and the Team Fortress team being hired.
While developers were busy trying to stop people downloading there games, Valve seen a future of games being a service rather than just buying a good to be discarded. And more or less popularized digital distribution across all platforms. Even when you look at things that are in the primordial stage of streaming like online, that's a service and probably is the future of gaming.
Another good example is Team Fortress 2. Rather than banging about 4 maps for £20 then re-releasing the game every X month. They selected the cream of the crop user made maps and gave players the option to buy stamps to support the very best maps. This also applied to cosmetic items, much of which were designed by the community itself. This made users who made good content, tens of thousands of dollars. All of which, optional. It's went from something like 4 maps to 50. Which dozens of new abilitys and weapons. All the map packs made by Valve themselfs or otherwise haven't cost a penny and the reason they do on Xbox is because of Microsoft being greedy piglets.
Another example would be cross-play. If you buy a game for the Mac, you can also use it across the pc and vice versa without any extra charge. to promote this feature as well as Portal 2, they basically gave Portal away for free. Likewise with Alien Swarm.
Seeing free2play was the future, they added free2play to steam. As well as turning Team Fortress 2 into a free2play game to generate revenue. This is probably the case with Dota 2 as well, which itself was created by modders. This will happen on consoles and in fact, is.
I don't trust EA. They are mostly jerks. Not as big a jerks as Activision or Ubisoft but they are still big jerks. It's too bad Gabe Newell will probably die prematurely due to morbid obesity he's such a wonderful person.
Speaking of Ubisoft, I read somewere they are making a pass to combat re-sales but it isn't free, it's something like £9? Seriously? This is what gaming has come too?
