Valve president and founder Gabe Newell has confirmed Valve are working on new games, and possibly a single player one at that.
In an interview with 1 News, Newell discussed staffs’ interest in moving the company to New Zealand (as Newell had moved to his family home in 2020), along with hosting tournaments for DOTA 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive in the country.
Once again Newell was asked about the continuation of the Half-Life and Portal series. “I’ve successfully not spoken about those things for a long time and I hope to continue to not talk about them until they are moot questions,” Newell replied. “Then we’ll move on to a new set of questions.”
“The nice thing is, by not answering those questions, I avoid the community coming up with new, equally-difficult-to-answer questions.” Newell was equally evasive over the rumored project Citadel, stating he had no idea about that code name. “Just to be clear – internally we have a bunch of different names and they change over time.”
However, Newell did relent and state there were games in development, and that at least one of them may be a single player game thanks to Half-Life: Alyx creating “momentum” in the company.
“We definitely have games in development that we’re going to be announcing – it’s fun to ship games.
[…] Alyx was great – to be back doing single-player games, that created a lot of momentum inside of the company to do more of that.”
Newell also confirmed he has gotten some of his (in 1 News’ words) “traveling companions” into DOTA 2. A lot of employees are also currently into Apex Legends. Newell himself has also been playing the Left 4 Dead games, and trying to complete them on expert, along with tower defense game Ancient Planet.
Will any of these titles affect what Valve is working on next? Only time will tell.
Newell also express his sympathy at the situation CD Projekt Red were in with Cyberpunk 2077, and that it would be “unfair to throw stones at any other developer, because just getting something as complex and ambitious as that out the door is pretty amazing.”
He also explained the Valve’s Index VR headset had production issues in New Zealand due to other large companies bought out “the entire supply” of vital components as soon as COVID-19 hit.
“We actually have components that are manufactured in Wuhan and when you’re setting up your manufacturing lines it doesn’t occur to you that you’re suddenly going to be dependent on this peculiar transistor that’s sitting on one board that you can’t get.
Everybody ended up running into the same problem simultaneously – you go from, ‘Oh, we’re in great shape,’ to, ‘What do you mean Apple or Microsoft just bought the next two years’ supply of this just so they could make sure they aren’t going to run out?’
You went from a situation where everything was getting done just in time to people buying up all the available supplies.
So the only thing keeping us from shipping in New Zealand at this point is just getting enough of them made – we’re very much manufacturing constrained.”
