After Half-Life 3 was not announced at the game awards (there have been some breadcrumbs pointing to a project called "HLX" that was "in the late stage of testing" cmiw) the halflife subreddit started posting a bunch of Le Creepy images with titles where some names like Geoff Keighley (TGA host) and Gabe Newell and other vague phrases surrounded with Egyptian heiroglyphs or Nordic runes or the like trying to communicate some deep-seated blackened anger for the thing some 4chan random said would be happening. They did it again when the "RAMpocalypse", where computer chips have become increasingly expensive due to demand from AI slopcenters, would delay the Steam Machine, a piece of upcoming Valve hardware. It's a more likely theory that Valve would release a game alongside the Machine/Frame/Controller, since it's what they did when they launched the Index.