While he spends quarantine in New Zealand, the national news channel has prompted Valve man Gabe Newell to sit down and clearly fail to answer some of his very favorite questions. They did their best to ask about all games ending in three, but Newell, of course, declined to comment on the subject. He was willing to say that the company currently has games in development and also said the launch of Half-Life: Alyx had sparked a desire to continue making single-player games.
Newell spoke to 1 News about things like esports and Cyberpunk 2077, but of course it always comes back to Valve’s own games.
“We definitely have games in development that we’re going to announce – it’s fun shipping games,” he said. Admittedly, it is not surprising that they are working on games. Valve has had all kinds of games in development over the years. We heard enough about it in last summer’s Half-Life: Alyx – Final Hours documentary. They started and canceled everything from Half-Life 3 to some sort of RPG to other VR experiments.
The bigger question is whether they will finish and release the games they are currently working on. Newell’s mention that Valve could actually announce everything they have in development is interesting.
Somewhat on that subject, Newell says, “Alyx was great – being able to play single player games again, which gave the company a lot of momentum to do more of that.” That’s not what I would call a concrete commitment, but it’s good to hear that it might inspire Valve to get Alyx out the door and let other single player games run wild more often.
As for all those series with no third entry, at least they tried. “I haven’t talked about those things successfully for a long time, and I hope not to keep talking about them until they’re unquestioned questions,” Newell said. “Then we’ll move on to a new set of questions.”