Artifact is Valve’s first new game in years, but it’s just the start of the company’s return to games.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that Valve simply did nothing but run Steam and develop hats for Team Fortress 2. However, alongside the announcement of a brand-new competitive card game called Artifact, company head Gabe Newell confirmed that Valve would be re-entering the software industry with a slew of new titles.
No, there was no news on Half-Life 3, but if Valve comes back to software development and publishing, there’s still a sliver of hope left.
Speaking at the announcement of Artifact, Newell explained that “Artifact is the first of several games that are going to be coming from us”. Of these games, three will be in VR, as Newell revealed in an interview with Eurogamer. “Right now we’re building three VR games,” he explains. “When I say we’re building three games, we’re building three full games, not experiments.”
So why the delay on making games? Turns out, it’s because Valve was scared about how things in the PC space were trending. It saw a world where the likes of Microsoft, Facebook and Google were all trying to lock people into “the kind of closed, high margin ecosystem that Apple’s done”. Creating a closed platform for PC is a bad thing, not just for Valve’s business, but also for consumer freedom. It set out to destabilise that.
To do so, it released mini PCs known as Steam Boxes, developed the TV-style Steam Big Picture and worked with HTC to bring the open SteamVR platform to the masses with the HTC Vive. Now that’s all out of the way, Valve feels it’s in a space where it can flex its creative muscles once more and now has the hardware knowledge to create experiences that are rich and interactive “Now there’s pretty much no project in the hardware space that we wouldn’t be comfortable taking on,” Newell explained.
Interestingly, Nintendo’s game development prowess was one reason for why Valve decided to steer itself down such a winding path.
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Source: Alphr