Developer Hopoo Games, the indie dev team behind Risk Of Rain, Risk Of Rain 2 and Deadbolt, have announced they now work for Valve. That’s Valve, the makers of Half-Life, Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2 and the not-so-secret-anymore upcoming game Deadlock. As well as the owner of Steam.
In a tweet, Hopoo Games also announced that their unannounced project has been cancelled.
Not everyone made at Hopoo made the transition, but the two co-founders Paul Morse and Duncan Drummond are among those that are Valve-bound.
In one way, it’s interesting to see Valve hiring and/or acquiring indie devs in their local area. The last time Valve made some form of acquisition was them acquiring Campo Santo, the makers of Firewatch. The talent there contributed to Half-Life Alyx among other projects across the private corporration, at the cost of shelving In The Valley Of The Gods, a game announced prior to Valve’s acquisition.
Both Campo Santo and Hopoo Games are based in Bellevue, Washington and Seattle, Washington, respectively. Valve is based in Bellevue.
Risk Of Rain At Risk?
The Risk Of Rain IP is looking shaky under new management at the moment.
The Risk Of Rain IP was sold to their publisher, Gearbox Publishing (i.e. the publishing arm of Gearbox Software, the folks behind Borderlands) in 2022 for an undisclosed amount.
Risk Of Rain 2 recently just recieved its first DLC under new caretakers Gearbox Software, Seekers Of The Storm. Unfortunately it’s not been recieving well by fans, with the reviews on Steam standing at Mostly Negative at the time of writing.
Reasons why the new DLC being not well recieve includes the game being unstable with save-destroying bugs, new items being underwhelming, and some odd decisions like tying gameplay features to framerates which makes the game go wonky when played beyond 60 FPS.