I wouldn't say just Valve, a few others like Tripwire are pretty good too. But I know what ya mean, Gaming is all about money for nearly every developer now a days, have you seen the "DLC" for some of the games? Burnout Paradise will instantly unlock every vehicle in the game if you pay for it. Bleh, I miss the old days.

Also Halo 2 Vista, fucking rediculous. There is no way in hell the game should require that much good hardware to run, it looks worse than half life 2 and uses twice as much resources.

You forgot about Blizzard, StarCraft II pretty much works on any jumk (I even tried running it on netbook and it worked, not really playable but hey any desktop PC will run it with decent framerate).

True
As you can see on Zelda and Mario games.
The older games were much harder than the newer.

Tru dat.

Old-Skool FTW

Kinda got a point but check out indie games; hardly saw anyone complaining that they couldn't run Plants vs. Zombies >.<