Campo Santo, the architects behind the indie hit Firewatch from 2016, has been acquired by Valve. The surprise move was announced today via the former indie studio"s official blog, revealing that the entire 12 person team is now working under Valve"s roof in Bellevue.
Describing the endeavor, Campo Santo said it was surprised to find that its work ethic of "surprising, delighting, and entertaining the customers" was very much alike to how Valve functions, adding "It quickly became an obvious match."
The blog post went on to explain:
We had a series of long conversations with the people at Valve and everyone shared the satisfaction we take in working with people whose talents dwarf our own to make things we never thought possible. Both sides spoke about our values and how, when you get right down to it, we, as human beings, are hard-limited by the time we have left when it comes to making the things we care about and believe in. They asked us if we’d all be interested in coming up to Bellevue and doing that there and we said yes.
It was further revealed that the newly acquired development team will remain as a group working on its upcoming adventure game, In the Valley of Gods, which is now a Valve game.
Gabe Newell said recently that the Seattle-based gaming giant will soon begin pumping out full-fledged games again, and now with the development teams behind Firewatch as well as Kerbal Space Program under its wing, it will be interesting to see what sort of games are in the pipeline.