Wouldn't this earn them just as much bad will when people here they stopped developing their most popular title in favor of more F2P games and shitty Steam releases? I mean look at Konami, or hell, look at Capcom and Square a few years back. Companies that did the same thing and financially faltered as a result.
The games they develop now are extremely well made and their customers love them. At this point people will be more annoyed if they forego their CS:GO and Dota 2 updates to focus on HL3.
To put it into perspective CS:GO has more concurrent players than BF4/BF:HL has on all platform combined. And Dota 2 is at least twice as popular than that.