To straighten out some misconceptions:
VALVE is a very successful game designer in Bothell, Washington; Half-life being just one of their well-known productions.
They created STEAM to distribute their own products at first. That worked so well that STEAM began distributing for other publishers, such as Auran in OZ (Trainz). Things did not always go as smoothly with the other products because the liaison between the parties was not as close as with their parent company.
There was, within STEAM, and VALVE, the same dismay over the state of the SSE release that we have seen here. Although the programmers at VALVE, at least those that I know, were certainly not as naïve about the difficulties of software development as many forum members, there was the expected grumblings and intemperate suggestions by some to stop distributing until the problems were fixed. Word of this apparently reached the ears of some journalists or bloggers eager for gossip.
There was, to the best of my friends’ knowledge, no serious intention to stop distribution of SSE.
