Then how do you explain that Gabe greenlit Half-Life Alyx? A game which is the complete antithesis of CSGO and DOTA? And also garnered acclaim and sold a lot of VR headsets?
On the other hand, Gabe Newell also greenlit Artifact and Underlords, both games trying to cash in on various genres with the DOTA 2 license. (card games for Artifact, and auto-battlers for Underlords) Artifact was a flop from the beginning, despite being developed by Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic: The Gathering. People didn't like how the sheer amount of RNG in the game gave the player the feeling of having little to no control, even though the diehard Artifact stans insisted that playing around the RNG is part of the game. The game was also both overly complex, and overly simple at the same time. And finally, the game pretty much Charged For Everything, as in the $20 price tag for the game itself (which cannot be refunded after you open the first pack you get from finishing the tutorial, as Valve clearly made that to bypass the refund policy), needing to buy cards or packs to construct decks, and buying tickets to play in the so-called "competitive" draft format, which requires you to win 3 times to break even. Valve also originally would not make balance changes to cards, to "preserve the value of them" (which didn't happen), but they did end up nerfing cards. The player base plummeted, and Valve would go silent for a long time, saying that they need time to fix the game, and that they're in it for the "Long Haul". Valve then out of nowhere announced a rework of the game, only to then give up on the game completely. The game was at the point that people were glad that Artifact failed so hard, because those trends would have been more common place in other games, just like how Valve made certain monetization methods popular in games (but not for the players), such as the focus on cosmetics, loot boxes, battle passes, etc.
As for Underlords, Valve originally tried to reach out to the Auto Chess devs, which was a popular auto-battler custom game in DOTA 2, but the two could not come to an agreement, mainly because the AC devs wanted to stay in home country China to work on the game, while Valve wanted to bring them over to their office in the US. That resulted in Valve developing Underlords, which had a good start. However, the Big Update, which implemented the Underlords themselves, was looked at negatively by the players, since they pidgeon holed players into specific builds. Valve also implemented a Battle Pass system for the game, with an original end date in 2021, but at the end of that year, they quietly changed it to 2031, which is their way of saying that they have given up on the game, and won't update it anymore.
Going back to the topic itself, I'm not sure if this considered to be "Good Media", but
Spec Ops: The Line, would lead to things in later video games (and other media too) that people don't like. The game's theme of trying to chastise the player for doing immoral things, even if it's the only choice, i.e. the White Phosphorous scene, seems like a step in trying to push moral values from the developers, onto the players. The game was also another example of the "Subverting Expectations" theme that a lot of media has been doing lately, to spite fans of older versions of the media. Also, didn't some people see the setting of Dubai being buried in sand, as an early example of showing climate change in a game? That also reminded me of how Battlefield 2042 has a map, Hourglass, which takes place in Doha, Qatar (which is not too far from Dubai), and is also buried in sand, and the War of 2042 started due to climate change, and later a Kessler effect that causes a ton of satellites to crash into Earth, causing over 40 nations to become failed states, leaving only the US and Russia as the sole two Superpowers in the World. (China is omitted completely, to avoid the game being banned in China, since BF4 got banned in China after the first DLC came out.)
