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PC Gamer > Gabe Newell: 'Hooray! Valve's going to start shipping games again'
Gamespot > Valve Has Several Games In Development
Half-Life 3 isn't confirmed yet, but at least we can dream again.
LOL, he's never going to stop stringing us along. Gabe is going to go to his grave as the greatest troll who ever lived.
PC Gamer said:Valve was "jealous of Nintendo," now has the expertise to "develop hardware and software simultaneously."
Gabe Newell gives a presentation at Valve about upcoming card game Artifact.
At a presentation for upcoming Dota 2-themed card game Artifact at Valve's offices in Bellevue, Washington today, Gabe Newell reiterated that Valve is getting back into developing new games beyond its current roster of multiplayer titles. After talking about Valve's focus on Steam and hardware during the past several years, which he described as "an investment in the future", Newell said "Artifact is the first of several games that are going to be coming from us. So that's sort of good news. Hooray! Valve's going to start shipping games again."
That's games, plural: Artifact isn't the only game Valve is working on. In a January 2017 Reddit AMA, Newell did confirm that Valve was working on at least one fully-fledged singleplayer game. And the following month, in roundtable interviews with PC Gamer, Newell said that Valve was working on "three big VR games." Today's statement doesn't make it 100 percent clear whether Valve has projects in development beyond these previously mentioned games, but it is a possibility. "We aren't going to be talking about it today," Newell said, "but sort of the big thing, the new arrow we have in our quiver, really, is our ability to develop hardware and software simultaneously."
Newell gave some background on Valve's projects from the last few years, like SteamVR and the Vive headset, explaining that the company was worried about the PC heading in the direction of an iPhone-esque closed ecosystem. "You can see that Microsoft was like, wow, how can we make Windows more like that? Or Zuckerberg is saying, 'well I tried to compete in the phones, I got my ass kicked, so I'm going to create this new thing, VR, which will allow me to recreate the kind of closed, high margin ecosystem that Apple's done.' And that really started to worry us, because we thought that the strength of the PC is about its openness … So we started to make some investments to offset that."
"We've always been a little bit jealous of companies like Nintendo."
Gabe Newell
Those investments, Newell said, meant they hadn't released a new game since Dota 2—but that work wasn't wasted time. "The positive thing about the Vive is, in addition to making sure that nobody created an iOS closed platform for it, was also that it gave us the opportunity to develop our in-house expertise in hardware design. Five years ago, we didn't have electrical engineers and people who know how to do robots. Now there's pretty much no project in the hardware space that we wouldn't be comfortable taking on. We can design chips if we need to, we can do industrial design, and so on. So that added to that."
With Valve's new hardware chops, it seems like we can expect more than new games from the company. "We've always been a little bit jealous of companies like Nintendo," Newell said. "When Miyamoto is sitting down and thinking about the next version of Zelda or Mario, he's thinking what is the controller going to look like, what sort of graphics and other capabilities. He can introduce new capabilities like motion input because he controls both of those things. And he can make the hardware look as good as possible because he's designing the software at the same time that's really going to take advantage of it. So that is something we've been jealous of, and that's something that you'll see us taking advantage of subsequently."
Gamespot > Valve Has Several Games In Development
Half-Life 3 isn't confirmed yet, but at least we can dream again.
So they're developing 3-4 games right now. They're also playing around with VR for Half-Life 2 although they're saying this doesn't currently have a commercial ambition or strategy, yet.Gamespot said:Valve boss Gabe Newell has signaled an end to the company's long hiatus. At a talk yesterday, the president said the company is "going to start shipping games again." He also opened up about why the pace of its releases slowed down so much, and what's changed since then.
The presentation (via PC Gamer) was centered mostly on Artifact, the Dota 2-themed card game announced last year. But he made sure to point out that it's not the only game on Valve's slate. He explicitly said that it's "the first of several games" coming from the studio. Since the release of Dota 2, Valve's gaming efforts have been focused mostly on supporting it and Team Fortress 2.
As for why Valve moved away from games, Newell frankly said he was concerned about PCs becoming more of a closed system. He said his investments into Vive were an effort to "offset" the impact of Microsoft and Facebook looking into OS and VR concepts that the company considered less open. The result has been a newly revised Valve that he says feels comfortable in hardware design as well as software. Newell hinted that may impact how they treat their game designs going forward.
"We've always been a little bit jealous of companies like Nintendo," Newell said. "When Miyamoto is sitting down and thinking about the next version of Zelda or Mario, he's thinking what is the controller going to look like, what sort of graphics and other capabilities. He can introduce new capabilities like motion input because he controls both of those things. And he can make the hardware look as good as possible because he's designing the software at the same time that's really going to take advantage of it. So that is something we've been jealous of, and that's something that you'll see us taking advantage of subsequently."
As for the identity of these mystery projects, Newell was much more tight-lipped. He did say in a Reddit AMA in January that they're working on a single-player game. He's also mentioned three more VR games on the way. That's four more in addition to Artifact, with a notable focus on custom hardware, so those could be the games he was referring to. Either way, though, it sounds like Valve is back in the games business.
LOL, he's never going to stop stringing us along. Gabe is going to go to his grave as the greatest troll who ever lived.
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