Twitch is now on the docket for X’s lawsuit against companies that stopped advertising on the social media site. X amended its lawsuit on Monday to include Twitch as a defendant in its lawsuit in a federal court in Wichita Falls, Texas, according to Reuters.

The new complaint claims that the gaming stream site owned by Amazon stopped purchasing ads on X at the end of 2022. X alleges that Twitch and other companies conspired with the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) network’s Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) initiative to withhold “billions of dollars in advertising revenue” from Elon Musk’s social media company. 

The plaintiff alleges the boycott violated federal antitrust laws and is demanding a jury trial to settle the matter. GARM also announced its discontinuation two days after X filed its lawsuit.

X Corp.’s joint lawsuit first filed in August also includes the WFA, the global food manufacturer Mars Incorporated, the drugstore chain CVS and the Danish energy company Ørsted A/S over the advertising boycott. X also has a lawsuit against the media watchdog group Media Matters for publishing a report showing X displayed ads next to antisemitic content on the platform.

It’s Half-Life 2’s 20th anniversary, and in celebration, Valve has released a special update that adds the Episode One and Episode Two expansions to the base game so you can play it all straight through, along with a two-hour documentary, developer commentary, and much more. The game is also free on Steam until November 18. Valve’s announcement itself is an interactive experience — grab the gravity gun at the bottom of the page and you can pick up just about anything on the screen and toss it around (including that can, which you can then put in the trash).

“Every map in Half-Life 2 has been looked over by Valve level designers to fix longstanding bugs, restore content and features lost to time, and improve the quality of a few things like lightmap resolution and fog,” the team says. The release notes are extensive, including updates to the graphics settings, gamepad controls and the Steam Deck menu. Valve's also published some old demo videos from Half-Life 2's development. 

Valve

The anniversary celebration also brings good news for anyone who didn’t manage to snag a copy of Raising the Bar, the 2004 behind-the-scenes book that’s since become a coveted collector’s item: an expanded second edition is coming in 2025. This new version adds concept art from Episode One and Episode Two, plus “ideas and experiments for the third episode that never came to be.”

Unsurprisingly, yesterday’s big Half-Life release wasn’t the sequel to Half-Life 2 or even the third Half-Life 2: Episode entry, but a 20th-anniversary update to Valve’s legendary 2004 game. And given what studio co-founder Gabe Newell has to say on the subject in a 2-hour documentary that the company released in tandem with the update, it seems less likely than ever that we’ll be seeing either follow-up anytime soon.

Newell explains what he calls his “personal failure” near the end of the video (at this timestamp):

You can’t get lazy and say, “oh, we’re moving the story forward.” That’s copping out of your obligatiion to gamers, right? Yes, of course they love the story. They love many, many aspects of it. But sort of saying that your reason to do it is because people want to know what happens next... you know, we could’ve shipped it, like, it wouldn’t have been that hard. You know, the failure was — my personal failure was being stumped. Like, I couldn’t figure out why doing Episode 3 was pushing anything forward.

That’s not to say the company didn’t try. One idea for Episode 3 included an “Ice Gun” that Engineer David Speyrer says in the documentary would’ve let players spray “amorphous shapes” that could serve as barriers, platforms, or even “Silver Surfer mode” paths that they would shoot in front of themselves to cross gaps. Speyrer also talks about “blob” enemies that could move through grates or split into smaller “head-crabby things.”

But Speyrer and other Valve employees featured in the video echo Newell’s sentiment that they just couldn’t come up with ideas that seemed worth a new Half-Life game. One of its level designers said something similar in a 2020 IGN interview. He also blamed “scope creep” — the tendency of a project to slowly grow beyond its original plan — and the company wanting to get going on developing the Source 2 engine that drives VR prequel Half-Life: Alyx.

“Newell sees Half-Life 2 as an engine, a platform, or at best a whole industry unto itself,” gaming journalist Geoff Keighley, who Newell once gave a key card for Valve’s studios and told to “do whatever you want,” wrote for Gamespot in 2016. Creative blocks aside, perhaps Valve just has too many bigger fish to fry.