Valve's CEO and founder, Gabe Newell, has announced that following the release of the company's first game in years -- the competitive DotA 2 card game, Artifact -- that Valve will be releasing further games in the future and that this marks a turning point in the company's plans, where it will now be getting back into game developing full time once again.
The announcement was made during a presentation for Artifact, where Gabe Newell said the reason that Valve had focused so long on Steam development and creating hardware solutions like the Steam controller and HTC Vive headset, was because it wanted to make an "investment in the future." Valve saw the likes of Microsoft and Facebook (with the Oculus purchase) attempting to build closed ecosystems in Windows and VR and Valve wanted to head that off at the pass.
"You can see that Microsoft was like, wow, how can we make Windows more like [Apple]? Or Zuckerberg is saying, 'well I tried to compete in the phones, I got my ass kicked, so I'm going to create this new thing, VR, which will allow me to recreate the kind of closed, high margin ecosystem that Apple's done.' And that really started to worry us, because we thought that the strength of the PC is about its openness … So we started to make some investments to offset that."
Now though, it's time to start making games again.
"Artifact is the first of several games that are going to be coming from us," he said, via PCGamer. "So that's sort of good news. Hooray! Valve's going to start shipping games again."
Although this is the first confirmation we've had in some time that Valve was working on new software, we have had hints previously that something was in the works. In early 2017 Valve confirmed it was working on a single player game and later that year we learned it was working on three fully-fledged VR titles. It's not clear if this latest announcement is related to those earlier titles, but either way, it's good to know that Valve is back in the game making business proper.