Half-Life 3 confirmed? A Valve dataminer claims that has happened

The internet meme "Half-Life 3 confirmed!" has been around for quite a while. However, this weekend, a well-known Valve data miner claims to have found evidence that the developer is indeed working on the long-awaited next game in the first-person shooter series.

Over the weekend, Eurogamer reported that the online resume of voice actor Natasha Chandel has a listing for a Valve game she worked on with the code name Project White Sands. Many people believe that's a reference to Half-Life 3. The online resume later removed that particular credit and has subsequently gone down due to going over its bandwidth limit.

Now, the well-known Valve data miner Tyler McVicker posted a video on his YouTube channel (via GameSpot) where he claims that the Project White Sands listing is indeed a new single-player Half-Life game.

McVicker claims that back in 2021, the code name for this game was uncovered inside the code for other Valve games. That code name is HLX. According to McVicker:

In the interim, I have been slowly and silently digging into this story. HLX is a confusing one. HLX seems to be a fully-fledged non-VR Half-Life game, something that seems too good to be true, and something that I wanted to be very sure of before going live with any of this information.

He added later in the video:

Do I think this is Half-Life 3? I gotta be very careful in answering that question. But yes.

While all of that may be true, the bigger question that has not been answered is, "Will Valve ever release a true Half-Life 3 game?" Fans have been waiting for the cliffhanger ending for Half-Life 2: Episode 2 to be resolved ever since it was released in October 2007, over 16 years ago. In 2020, Valve released the VR-exclusive game Half-Life: Alyx, which is set before the events of Half-Life 2.

Earlier this year, McVicker and others reported Valve was working on a new multiplayer game with the name Deadlock. Despite lots of screenshots and gameplay footage that allegedly show the game in action, Valve has yet to comment on the leaks.