THE TOP STORY
The latest developments at the secretive company
Valve doesn’t need to make any more games. Dota 2, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, and Steam are enough to keep the company afloat. But for those of us who miss the days when it made other games, there may be some good news. When asked in a recent roundtable interview at its Bellevue office, attended by PC Gamer, Gabe Newell revealed that the company is working on three full VR games, clarifying that they’re not just experiments. Newell compared its work on VR across hardware and software simultaneously to that of Nintendo, which has always created its own games specifically to get the most out of its hardware. It’s not exactly Half-Life 3, then, but it does mean there will be a point where you can play new Valve games, providing you’re willing to buy a Vive.
“It feels like we’ve been stuck with mouse and keyboard for a really long time, and that the opportunities to build much more interesting kinds of experiences for gamers were there, we just need to sort of expand what we can do,” Newell said, as reported by Eurogamer. “But it’s not about being in hardware, it’s about building better games. It’s about taking bigger leaps forward with the kinds of games that we can do.” They’re apparently being created using Source 2 and Unity.
Elsewhere in Valve land, Steam Greenlight is being ditched in favour of Steam Direct. Greenlight currently lets players vote on which games appear on Steam’s shopfront. But Direct will, for a variable fee that hasn’t been confirmed yet, allow any developer to sell their games on the platform.
It won’t be a free-for-all, though. “Developers will need to complete a set of digital paperwork, similar to the process of applying for a bank account,” the company says. Games will also have to pass a compatibility test. Let’s hope it’s a strict vetting process, otherwise Steam will be even more flooded with broken games.
More developments at the company came in February, when it was revealed that Portal writer Erik Wolpaw had left the company. He contributed to Double Fine’s Psychonauts 2, having worked on the original, and had credits on Half-Life 2’ s extra episodes and the Left 4 Dead series. Andy Kelly
steam direct will, for a fee, allow any developer to sell their games