It's clear from the context that they're referring to quality.
[EDIT: to all the people responding to me, I'm answering the parent's question of what the GP's 'cares' was referring to, which is clearly indicated by the comment they are in turn responding to. I'm not making any point or argument about Valve's commitment to quality or lack thereof]
They obviously don't. Look at TF2, they refuse to say it's dead but it hasn't received a proper update in a year. Instead, they spread a gambling model across all their current games and now sit and collect profits. Heck, even those "steam boxes" which were supposed to make PC the "final gaming platform" fell way short. Valve is an e-commerce company with a game development side business now and frankly, their recent output hasn't been good...
This isn't a defense but the TF2 team is only about like 7 dedicated people last I heard? There's artists and what not shared between teams who I'm not including in that tally though. Valve News Network talked about it once.
The issue with DOTA is that its audience is self-limiting. You're locking 5 strangers together in an hour long game where failure is heavily, heavily punished and you're penalized for leaving early.
Where are the games for those of us who loved Half-Life and Portal? The last thing I want to do at the end of a long day is be yelled at by college kids and teenagers for an hour.
Designers' perceptions of quality can get out of synch with what users actually want. Sometimes we assume that people want things that are actually negotiable.
More concretely, would HL fans rather have a HL3 that is merely a game, flaws and all, or are they waiting for the second coming (third?)?
If HL3 gets made, is a game with warts and all, that's not necessary a bad thing. It may be that the dev team is holding themselves to an impossible standard rather than users holding them to an impossible standard.
[EDIT: to all the people responding to me, I'm answering the parent's question of what the GP's 'cares' was referring to, which is clearly indicated by the comment they are in turn responding to. I'm not making any point or argument about Valve's commitment to quality or lack thereof]