>>718509034
There's a chance yeah, it's valve, they restart shit all the time.
But the game getting leaked/soft closed alpha tested most likely avoided it, I wouldn't be surprised if there was whispers of the game getting cancelled like countless other valve projects we've never seen but one or two disgruntled devs leaked it in protest/anger/frustration and ended up picking up steam after the initial disgusted reaction by most people.
I remember /v/ went from
>"what the fuck is this faggot MOBA shit that looks like ass"
to
>"HOLY SHIT THIS GAMES POTENTIALLY GOATED" real quick


>>718509724
TF2 got restarted around 4 times and cancelled like twice.
Valve does this shit all the time and there's a countless amount of games and projects they dropped or restarted, the anniversary video showed us footage from one of many attempts of episode 3 for example.