Valve's going to start shipping games again, Artifact being first' - Gabe Newell

Valve was "jealous of Nintendo," now has the expertise to "develop hardware and software simultaneously."

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."


Subsequently, this also crushes off the rumors of Microsoft buying valve.


However, news for half life 3 aren't to seen anywhere!

 

@Mr. Fox @Papusan @Falkentyne @Vasudev

 

Maybe it's just me but I'd really rather Valve fixed Steam than started pushing out games that are more at home on mobile platforms than on a gaming pc. I thought greenlight was the plague but thanks to steam direct the amount of junkware and asset flips on steam makes finding any decent game a demanding, time-consuming task rather than something easy and immediate.

 

Yes, Artifact, the most exiting and awaited gamer ever! Not!
Can't wait for TF2 themed card games as well as HL!

 

Not sure why you tagged @Mr. Fox , unless it has a benchmark he won't care.. :troll:

 

Wow. It feels good to know that I am not alone in thinking that. I used to really love Steam, but now it's like an Indie gamerboy's junkware paradise. I can never find anything good because of all the worthless clutter littering the Steam Store. Of the 215 games in my Steam library and 39 in my Origin library, I think there may be less than 20 that I truly love to play.

 

I like almost anything in a FPS genre. However, I do have a fair number of games that I do not care for, yet I own them only because they have a built-in benchmark.