>>215255200
if you believe what he said - it was supposedly an unfortunate moment in time where they'd all were interested in doing other stuff for a while, like steam as a platform, online competitive gaming like csgo and sheit, co-op gaming, tf2 hats, wanting to continue HL sometime later in the future.
but eventually too much time has passed and as you said, they didn't just want to churn out a technologically dated product with their passion franchise, it had to be something revolutionary.
they canned it for a while and throughout the years i guess their idea of what the franchise could become in the future changed drastically, now it wasn't frozen and waiting to be finished in some spectacular way, no they could just as likely always go back to it and test the waters with a spin-off. seeing as to how multiverse faggotry became popular thanks to capeshit that is where they decided to cast their lot - a semi-retcon that both resolved and not resolve the decade old cliffhanger.
my guess is they'll eventually complete the series and then continue doing further spin-offs, but who knows, they're takign their sweet ass time