That’s the fantasy. It’s full of politics and informal power structures though.

Well yeah, Hopoo sold the RoR franchise to gearbox 2 years ago.

Moving from a small indie studio to Valve they are giving up a lot of agency.

They’re still at it, they bought Campo Santo (Firewatch Devs) in 2018 and now their game In The Valley of Gods is never gonna happen, they worked on Alyx instead.

They poached a bunch of folks from Hopoo Games recently too.

The first time I opened an invite steam said I couldn’t join, but on a whim I opened it a week later and it worked. I still live in a different city so don’t know what happened.