Valve hasn"t had a major game release since the launch of Dota 2 in 2013, and Portal 2 from 2011 was the last single-player game that came out of the studio. But with Valve"s game drought set to finally come to an end with its upcoming trading card game Artifact, we could be seeing even more games from the studio before long.
During the Artifact presentation given to the press today, Valve president Gabe Newell confirmed that the studio will be pumping out games again, saying 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."
While Newell did not go into the specifics of these unannounced games, in previous talks, he had said that the studio was working on three full VR games. We will have to wait and see if the new games that Newell mentioned will be VR titles, or something different entirely. Also, the Kerbal Space Program development team is under the Valve umbrella now, and we have yet to see the project it is working on.
Newell elaborated that the company"s switch in focus from games to hardware and technology following Dota 2"s release was an investment to not let PC become a "closed, high margin ecosystem" like Apple"s, accusing Microsoft and Facebook of wanting to do just that. And it seems the investment has paid off, with Newell saying that Valve now has the "ability to develop hardware and software simultaneously," adding that "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".
Newell also said that Valve has been "a little bit jealous of companies like Nintendo":
"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."
With Valve"s new expertise in software and hardware development, it will be interesting to see how the company plans to take a leaf out of Nintendo"s book, hopefully, the wait won"t be too long.
Source and image: PCGamer