Valve Back in the Game-Making Bizz, Gabe Newell Confirms

You can already hear the Portal 3, Half-Life 3, and Left 4 Dead 4 rumors percolating because Steam Daddy himself Gabe Newell has confirmed that Valve wants to get back into the swing of making games, not just offering them via a client.

There was a special viewing of their Dota-inspired card game Artifact in which Newell himself talked about the process of creating this particular title and how it has inspired them to get back up on that bike of game creation, "Artifact is the first of several games that are going to be coming from us," he stated. "That's sort of good news! Hooray! Valve's going to start shipping games again!"

Said in classic Newell form (he's known to be a bit cheeky), his commentary definitely did little to dampen that fandom flame. Half-Life 3 has become somewhat of a holy grail for gamers. Not necessarily because the franchise was the best franchise to have ever existed, but because on some level we know we're never going to get it, so we want it even more. Don't even get us started on another Portal, though the graphic novel did very well in regards to satiating that fan thirst.

So why did Valve back away from game creation? Pretty simple, actually. Valve itself is a behemoth of a company. Steam is the go to gaming client for PC gamers and when the Steam application was put into hardware form with the consoles, well ... it's safe to say that Newell and the team's focus shifted from software to a more hardware-centric bottom line. Luckily, it looks like that's finally changing.

It seems that Gabe and crew are looking to emulate a bit of the Nintendo philosophy concerning the harmony of both software and hardware creation. As with the Big N, they not only were planning the next iconic The Legend of Zelda game, they were also planning new controllers to celebrate those beloved franchise. New skins, amiibo, and other peripherals to continue the hype of series that we love so much. It's that element of success, especially in the wake of the Nintendo Switch, that more and more companies are looking to Nintendo once more for inspiration, and Valve is no exception.

"We've always been a little bit jealous of companies like Nintendo. When Miyamoto is sitting down and thinking about the next version of Zelda or Mario, he's thinking what is the controller going to look like, what sort of graphics and other capabilities. He can introduce new capabilities like motion input because he controls both of those things. And he can make the hardware look as good as possible because he's designing the software at the same time that's really going to take advantage of it. So that is something we've been jealous of, and that's something that you'll see us taking advantage of subsequently."

We know of at least one single-player game that Valve is working on. As far as their next huge leap in gaming, we'll just have to be patient to find out!