Valve Is Shifting Focus Back to New Games
Valve is officially back to developing and shipping games. Gabe Newell, co-founder of Valve, made the announcement at a presentation for their upcoming Dota 2-themed card game Artifact.
Newell spoke on Valve’s focus on hardware in the recent years, calling it “an investment in the future.” He continued to say that “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.”
We know that Valve already has one singleplayer and three big VR games in development, but whether this new statement means more games outside of these is unclear.
“We aren’t going to be talking about it today, 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 said of the possibility.
In regards to Valve’s recent projects, like SteamVR and the Vive headset, Newell claimed that the company was worried about the direction of PC gaming.
“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,'” he said “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.”
Now that they’ve invested into more hardware, Valve is back to focusing on games.
“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.”
Maybe Half-Life 2: Episode 3 will finally get released? Probably not.