Gabe Newell has spoken to the media at his headquarters in Seattle about the state of the company, and has taken the opportunity to comment that they are preparing no less than 3 specific games for VR.
There is no denying that Valve has been one of the great pioneers in the video game industry, being one of the first to bet on digital downloads resulting in the largest digital distribution platform on the PC. And it is that imagining a gamer PC without Steam installed does not fit into anyone’s imagination. But what cannot be denied either is that Gabe Newell’s company has clearly and firmly opted for virtual reality since its inception, first collaborating with Oculus and then with HTC to launch the most successful virtual reality viewer on the market in the world of compatible.
However, we were all missing something. After the experiments with Team Fortress 2 and its Half-Life 2 saga in the Oculus development kits, we all dreamed of complete virtual reality games with the unmistakable stamp of Valve. And The fact is that The Lab is one of the most entertaining and varied experiences currently available, but it is still not a game. Well, this situation is going to change soon, since Newell himself confirms that they are working on 3 games designed for virtual reality. In a session, the AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit less than a month has already confirmed that they were working in virtual reality game, but this time it has come to giving us a number, something rather curious because the number 3 has a very special meaning for followers of Gordon Freeman (the protagonist of the saga Half-Life, for if we read someone from another planet). Will one of these three projects be related to the adventures of this peculiar scientist? At this point we don’t think anyone who lives outside the walls of Valve’s offices can affirm or deny it outright, but at least we have the consolation of knowing that Gabe Newell’s company remains committed not only to the development of its SteamVR platform, but also to something that they are great at although they don’t lavish as much as we all would like: the creation of games, and in this case specific for virtual reality.
One of the questions you might ask us is ‘Why the hell are we making hardware?’Well, at the moment we are creating 3 virtual reality games. And what we can do now is design the hardware at the same time as we design the software. It’s something Miyamoto has always done, right?
These are the words of Newell himself to different media, including Gamasutra, who have come to the Seattle offices.
[Miyamoto] he has the ability to think about input devices and system design when he builds his games. Our feeling is that that will allow us to create much more entertaining experiences for people. So the idea was something like, ‘Look, it has suddenly occurred to us that we can make money building hardware, because hardware has traditionally been a business with very low profits.’
