The team is also working hard to finish the Xen content

Nov 20, 2013 07:14 GMT  ·  By

The development team working on the impressive Black Mesa project announces that it has received approval from Valve to launch its remake of the original Half-Life on the Steam digital distribution service.

At the moment, the game does not have a clear launch date or an official price, but the announcement says that the latter will be relatively low in order to allow as many fans as possible to enjoy the project.

The all-volunteer 40-man team says that it has two reasons to launch Black Mesa on Steam as a retail product: “One is we believe we can make the game even better by having full access to the Source engine. This lets us tackle and fix limitations instead of working around them. The second is because frankly, our team could really use the financial help.”

At the same time, they assure all those who are playing the free version of Black Mesa that it will continue to receive full support and that an entirely new update will be launched, with all the maps offered under an open source model to the Half-Life fan community alongside some of the assets.

It’s unclear exactly what new features will be part of the retail version of Black Mesa, but the team offers more information soon.

Some fans will be disappointed to hear that at the moment plans to complete the game by releasing Xen content have been delayed and the launch is still “a ways off.”

The team explains that, “we have spent a HUGE amount of time porting the game to a new engine and fixing hundreds of bugs. The work to port to the new engine was not because of the decision to go retail, this was work that had to be done to get Black Mesa onto Steam and support our future plans.”

All those who are interested in the retail Steam version of Black Mesa can offer their feedback in an official thread.