Last week, Valve gave a presentation to the media on its latest in-house built game: Artifact. The Dota 2 card game was announced last year to mixed reception, though the good thing that we can see from this new game is that it is just the sign of things to come.
“Artifact is the first of several games that are going to be coming from us,” said Gabe Newell of Valve. “So that’s sort of good news.”
“Hooray! Valve’s going to start shipping games again.”
Valve has been quiet as of late when it comes to games development as focus shifted on them growing its highly-profitable digital store platform Steam as well as investing in VR with the creation of the Vive headset and SteamVR API.
As a result, there has been a significant lack of games coming from the studio that brought out masterpiece FPS series Half-Life. Many of its writers have since departed the studio, which were seen as signs of Valve never making games like its old days again.
Newell also mentioned one factor about this change in direction, and its due to Nintendo, which is both a hardware and software innovator. “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.”
Valve now has a hardware team thanks to their investment in VR, which will surely be put to good use.
“So that is something we’ve been jealous of, and that’s something that you’ll see us taking advantage of subsequently.”
Source: PC Gamer