14 DAY TRIAL // Valve boss Gabe Newell has openly talked about his company’s future project, including the new installments in the Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, Portal or Counter-Strike franchises, saying that it won’t be announcing anything until they’re closer to completion.
Valve is one of the most popular video game developers out there but fans are always upset because the company doesn’t like to share details about its upcoming projects, chief among which is the next installment in the Half-Life series, whether it’s called Half-Life 2: Episode Three or Half-Life 3.
Newell has now talked with Penny Arcade about this lack of sharing, saying that previous experiences have taught the company not to announce anything before it’s sure it can deliver the actual game in a timely manner.
"Part of the reason that we backed off talking so much about what was happening in the future is that when we've done that in the past, you know, with Half-Life 1 it was a year after we originally said it would be. Half-Life 2 basically if you go and read the forum posts apparently took us 50 or 60 years to get done,” Newell joked.
"We're trying to be careful not to get people too excited and then have to go and disappoint them. So we're sort of reacting in the other direction and saying, 'okay, well let's have things a little more baked before we start getting people all excited about it.'"
Newell says that his company is aware of how annoyed its fans are, but also adds that his team is trying to work on as many projects as possible.
"We're acutely aware of how much we annoy our fans and it's pretty frustrating to us when we put them into that situation," Newell said. "We try to go as fast as we can and we try to pick the things that we think are going to be most valuable to our customers and if there's some magic way we can get more work done in a day then we'd love to hear about it.”
The Valve boss also admits that his team is trying to avoid working too much on a certain franchise.
"We recognize that it's been a long time whereas we have so many games that people really love - Counter-Strike, Half-Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead, not a whole lot of Ricochet enthusiasts out there, and at the same time we want to be making sure that those games and those stories and those characters are moving forward while also making sure that we don't just get into terminal sequelitis."
Judging by Newell’s statements, it seems that a Half-Life 3 announcement won’t arrive until the game is almost done. As such, fans will have to keep on waiting for a confirmation.
Until then, Valve’s announced projects include the Dota 2 strategy game and the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive online shooter.