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According to his Facebook feed, Jay Pinkerton has left his role as a writer at Valve, as reported by Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

Fellow writers Faliszek, Wolpaw and Laidlaw have all lef the the game developer and publisher over the last two years, with Faliszek being, up to now, the most recent departee this past May.

Pinkerton joined Valve in 2008 after editing website and magazine Cracked Following the release of The Orange Box, was one of the team responsible for producing the amusing "Meet the…" videos on Team Fortress 2’s characters. He was also one of the co-writers on Portal 2. Pinkerton’s experience lies in comedic writing having contributed to comedy content creators CollegeHumour and National Lampoon.

Valve has very noticably shifted their priorities to publishing an dinvesting in technology over development of games, with their Steam publishing platform earning just under an estimated $3.5billion for 2016 according to Steam Spy, and a heavy focus on virtual reality with SteamVR and a partnership deal with HTC Vive.

Games for Valve have been few and far between, however the Valve developed DOTA 2 and CS:GO are still two of the most played games on the platform and are both highly successful esports titles. But fan calls for third titles in the Half-Life, Portal and Left 4 Dead franchises have largely fell on deaf ears.

Portal 2 was the last sinlge player game released by Valve back 2011, and The Lab sandbox VR game for HTC Vive was release in 2016. However Valve are still developing their Source 2 engine and Valve boss Gabe Newell said as recently as January in a Reddit ‘AMA’ session that single player games are still in development at the studio.