THE FUTURE
The combination of Valve Index and Half-Life: Alyx represents one potential future for the studio – one in which everyone makes the move to playing games in virtual reality, and Valve is there to provide every part of that experience, from the content itself to the way it’s delivered to the device you’re playing it on. As to whether that’s the future we’ll actually end up in, the studio is fairly happy to throw up its hands and admit it doesn’t know right now. “That’s the fundamental experiment and hypothesis [of Alyx],” Jeremy Selan says. “What if you put a world-class triple-A game team onto VR and say, ‘Go make something interesting’?”
As Valve tries to divine whether VR represents a viable future for gaming, the release of Alyx is a way of removing one variable from the equation. Valve’s fully aware of VR’s imperfections right now – “We know it’s a little high-friction; it sucks to have a tether, it’s too expensive, ease of use is not where we want it to be,” Selan says – but, having brought hardware capabilities in-house, it has the power to work on those problems. But first it wants to rule out any chance that the reason people aren’t playing VR is they think there’s nothing to play.
“If we can answer the question of, ‘Is this an experience that people really want?’ I think that other stuff is just a set of problems to solve down the road,” Dario Casali says. And if the answer turns out to be no? “We’re always prepared for failure,” Jeff
Leinbaugh, a hardware engineer working on Index, tells us. “It’s not as if we have a benchmark that we’ve already decided, ‘If this doesn’t happen then that’s it, we’re packing up and going home.’”
So it’s not quite as simple as ‘if Alyx fails, VR fails’. Whatever happens, it seems likely Valve will continue to push towards the next generation of VR tech – making something “smaller, lighter, more comfortable, cheaper,” as Selan puts it – in the hopes of eliminating every other variable that could possibly stand in the way of VR adoption. But how hard it pursues making games for VR, and what project the Alyx team end up wheeling their desks towards once this one is wrapped, will certainly be guided by the public response to the game. “This is the critical part of all the iteration we’ve been doing in hardware and software: we release it, and then our fans, our customers, will grade our answers,” Leinbaugh says. “We are really excited to learn what worked, and what didn’t work as well, to inform what we do next.”
As it waits for those results, the future is a little uncertain. Which seems to be business as usual for Valve – something that comes up a lot in our conversations is an unwillingness to plan anything too far ahead. “One of the things we sort of hate doing is making decisions for our future selves,” Robin Walker says. “We often say to ourselves: do we have to make this decision today? Because if you assume that you are getting more information every
day, then any decision put off will be a better decision than we can make today.”
Walker is specifically talking about one tiny decision in Alyx’s development here – the release plan for its SDK, the developer tools which would open the game up to modders. But we hear variations on this theme so often that it starts to feel almost as much a part of the studio philosophy as the flat hierarchy and letting employees pick their own projects. Not wanting to commit too far ahead is something that comes up when we’re talking about the possibility of a HalfLife 3, and whether the studio will continue to make VR games. It comes up again when we ask CS:GO’s Gautam Babbar about the decision to take the game free-to-play. “There was not a lot of strategic planning. It was more like, ‘Yeah, I think we’re ready’,” he tells us. “And that’s how we usually work at Valve – we try to just react to the playerbase and use that to make the right decision right now. We don’t come at it with a five-year plan. It’s more, ‘This is what they’re telling us now, let’s go fix that.’”
It’s not that there is no plan, exactly. It’s more that there are dozens, all being tested to see if they might represent a viable future for the studio. Until then, the breadth of projects being tackled by its 350 staff means Valve can keep its options open. If esports continues to shine, the work it’s been doing with CS:GO and Dota 2 – the two biggest games on
Steam – should continue to pay off. If a move into mobile seems worthwhile, then it’s already made inroads with Dota Underlords. If it no longer makes sense for the company to stay in the hardware market, it’s willing to step aside and let others do the work. “Since it isn’t really our goal to be in hardware for its own sake, it could be that in the future we just don’t need to participate in that,” Greg Coomer says. “But that’s not the world we think we’re in right now.”
If that isn’t Valve’s guiding principle, we have to ask, then what is? “There is a throughline to all these decisions we’ve made over time, to expand the definition of what we make and do,” Coomer tells us. And if anyone would know, it’s Coomer, one of the studio’s very first hires. He says the moves Valve has made to date, from developing games to forging Steam and eventually manufacturing hardware, all come from the studio asking itself a simple set of questions. “We’re not like other companies where we’re making decisions like that because we have some diversification goal or shareholders are demanding it. Instead we just ask, ‘How can we make customers happy? What are the ways that we are currently not able to do that, what would be a more holistic approach, and what are we constrained from doing right now because we’re not participating in [that field]?’ And as we look into the future, it really is the same set of decisions.”