During an with Geoff Keighley in a one-off podcast called GameSplice (via Polygon), Valve co-founder Gabe Newell discussed the possibility of another Half-Life game. He also offered some insight as to how Valve has evolved into a service platform and is shifting away from game development.

“You know, we love all those games, we love all those characters and universes and story lines and we have no shortage of opportunities.”

“If you think of it as each one of our franchises represents a tool … you just want to pick up the right tool at the right time. So like Dota 2 is an incredibly character-rich game. There are how many? 110 characters? So if you have a problem that involves wanting to work on the aspect of having lots and lots of strongly realised characteristics, then Dota 2 is the right place to do it.

“Team Fortress represents a tool. When we were thinking of what are the next challenges, we tend to pick the franchises that are sort of most useful going forward. And if we don’t have one, then we have to create a new one.”

“I get it. I’m a fan of TV shows, I’m a fan of writers, I’m a fan of movies, I’m a fan of games. I certainly understand why people are like ‘Hey, I remember this awesome experience and I’m starting to get worried that I’m never going to get to have it again.’ I’m a fan of Terry Pratchett and he has Alzheimer’s and it’s like ‘Oh my god, I may never get another great Discworld novel.’

“So we understand it and we feel that. We think at the end of the day customers are going to be really happy with where we spent our time and how we’ve turned that into entertainment for them. But we’re also going to build on what we’ve learned … and we’ve learned a lot. We’re not going to go all retro because there are too many interesting things that have been learned.”

“The only reason we’d go back and do like a super classic kind of product is if a whole bunch of people just internally at Valve said they wanted to do it and had a reasonable explanation for why they did,”

“But you know if you want to do another Half-Life game and you want to ignore everything we’ve learned in shipping Portal 2 and in shipping all the updates on the multiplayer side, that seems like a bad choice. So we’ll keep moving forward. But that doesn’t necessarily always mean what people are worried that it might mean.”

Valve recently unveiled the Source 2 engine and its VR headset that it’s creating with HTC. It also announced a release window of November 2015 for the Steam controller and announced Steam Link, which is a device that streams your games from your PC to your TV.

Interview source: Polygon,

 

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