Gabe Newell insists that Valve is definitely working on games

Gabe Newell, a man known for his impressive tolerance of people mentioning the word “three” during interviews, has been needing to put up with a great deal lately. He’s currently quarantining in New Zealand and while he’s got some downtime (although I’d hardly imagine a man like Newell is ever not busy) he’s been chatting to 1 News about what’s going on at Valve. Once again, Newell was forced to dodge questions about Half-Life 3 (which is never going happen) but did reveal that the company is working on a few games at the moment, spurred on by how much it enjoyed making Half-Life: Alyx.

When asked about the threequels to Half-Life and Portal, as well as more information on whatever “Citadel” is, Newell side-stepped them all. “I’ve successfully not spoken about those things for a long time and I hope to continue to not talk about them until they are moot questions. Then we’ll move on to a new set of questions,” he said. “The nice thing is, by not answering those questions, I avoid the community coming up with new, equally-difficult-to-answer questions.”

What was most interesting though was Newell confirmed that Valve does indeed have games in development that it intends to ship.

We definitely have games in development that we’re going to be announcing — it’s fun to ship games. Alyx was great — to be back doing single-player games, that created a lot of momentum inside of the company to do more of that.

While Newell does say that Valve intends to announce and even ship some of its projects, there’s absolutely no confirmation that this will actually happen. It might just be the case that Valve’s having fun behind closed doors, denying the public a chance at playing the next Counter Strike or DOTA… or Half-Life?

Nah, just kidding. It’s definitely Artifact 2.

Last Updated: January 21, 2021