14 DAY TRIAL // Valve's Gabe Newell has once again tackled the age-old debate concerning Half-Life 3, the long-awaited title from his own studio, and mentions that such a project will only happen if a team inside the studio wants to do it and has a good enough reason to justify the investment.
Valve has brought forth many stellar titles over the years, from the original Half-Life and its sequel Half-Life 2, to Portal 1 and 2, and in recent years, more multiplayer-focused experiences like Dota 2 or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which are both quite popular with millions of fans around the world.
Valve is learning from recent projects and working on new things
While talking with Geoff Keighley on GameSlice (story via Polygon), Valve boss Gabe Newell once again fleshed out the current mentality at the studio, which is focused on building new things and learning from past experiences.
According to Newell, the studio's internal teams are working on new projects that put to good use what they've learned in recent years. As such, fans shouldn't expect "classic" products like Half-Life 2 unless there's a good enough reason for such a aproject.
"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]," he said. 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," Newell explains.
As such, Valve will keep moving forward and work on new things, while using existing franchises where they work best.
At GDC 2015 earlier this month, the studio presented the HTC Vive virtual reality headset and demonstrated it using a Portal experience, and it made a lot of sense. In the future, it's unclear what else the studio might present in order to promote the Source 2 game engine that's going to launch later in the year.