While in his forties in New Zealand, the national news channel has gotten Valve’s guy, Gabe Newell, to sit down and not answer some of his favorite questions. They went out of their way to ask about all the games ending with three, but Newell of course refused to say anything about it. He was willing to say that the company has games in development at the moment and also mentioned that the release of Half-Life: Alyx had created despair within the company to continue creating single player games.
Newell spoke with 1 News about topics like sports and Cyberpunk 2077, but of course things always go back to Valve’s own games.
“We definitely have games in development that we’ll be announcing: it’s fun to submit games,” he said. Of course, it’s no wonder they’re working on games. Valve has developed all kinds of games over the years. We heard a lot of them in the documentary Half-Life: Alyx – Final Hours last summer. They’ve started and canceled everything from Half-Life 3 to some kind of role-playing game to other virtual reality experiments.
The most important question is whether they will finish and release any of the games they are currently playing. It’s interesting Newell’s mention that Valve could actually announce anything it has in development.
A bit on the subject, Newell says “Alyx was great, re-playing single-player games, which created a big boost within the company to do more of that.” This isn’t what I would call a concrete compromise, but it’s good to hear that getting Alyx out the door can inspire Valve to make other solitaire games more common.
As for all those series without third-party entries, well they tried it at least. “I haven’t talked about these things successfully in a long time and I hope to continue not talking about them until they are debatable issues,” Newell said. “Then we’ll move on to a new set of questions.”