Valve has Steam from which they take 30% of any game sale. So they will never hurt for cash. They can give away every game they ever make and still make a killing from selling others' games because they have the most popular and best working platform.

Valve is now in the content delivery network business and just happen to have a department that produce video games.

Heh, I remember how heavily Steam was derided back when they rolled out the beta. And people screamed bloody murder when they made it so you had to go through Steam to play CS online.

To be fair, it failed completely then -- Steam servers crashed, downloads were slow and it offered virtually no benefit.

It is funny CS enabled Valve to make a ton of money eventually

Valve is also working on DotA 2 (LoL is very similar to the original DotA).

We will have to see when dota2 comes out, but LoL is much more differentiated from dota than, say, HoN. I suspect that LoL will be considered to be "dota1.5".

Free to play has been huge for a while, see Farmville et all and all the f2p mmorpgs. Valve is actually late to the party.

Maybe, but they brought the keg compared to those typically lackluster and/or derivative games.