Greg Coomer, the product designer at the Steam company, assures us that a high percentage of the company’s employees are dedicated to developing video games.
Valve, the company behind Half-Life, Counter-Strike and PC’s most popular digital video game store, Steam, has several games in development, product designer Greg Coomer said in an interview with Japanese magazine Famitsu ( via GamingBolt ). Coomer adds that the Gabe Newell firm is interested in bringing back two of the brand’s most lauded series: Half-Life and Portal.
“Valve has a lot of games in development. We will continue to release games,” says the person who is the usual head of communication for the North American company. “Game development is critical to Valve. I don’t know the exact figure, but the percentage of employees involved in game development is high. A lot of people are involved.”
Although Coomer does not specify how many games, which sagas, or which genres they have in hand, he hints that at least a couple of the studio’s most praised series will have new installments in the future: “We love that world, and we want to continue exploring the Half-Life universe. ” “The short answer is: ‘Yes.’ Half-Life: Alyx signifies that Valve has more to say about that world .”
In addition, the product designer states that Valve wants to make “a lot” of new Portals in the future because the series “deserves to be explored further.” “I don’t have anything to announce right now, but I’d like to do another Portal one day,” he concludes.
The irregular pace of Valve releases in the last decade
The development of video games does not seem to have been a priority within Valve in recent years. However, it is also true that they have cancelled or restarted various projects, such as Half-Life 3 . Half-Life: Alyx, released in 2020, became the leading exponent of virtual reality and still is today, but its previous great success was Dota 2, published in 2013.
The Artifact card game, created in collaboration with Magic: The Gathering artificer Richard Garfield, was a resounding flop. Dota Underlords, also from 2020, started on the right foot, but other proposals in the auto chess genre ate the toast. And beyond that, there are just The Lab (for VR) and Aperture Desk Job (for Steam Deck) tech demos.