Valve is working on three full VR games

Valve is working on three full VR games

Gabe Newell says next generation of games won’t be mere demos
by Colin Campbell



Valve is working on three new virtual reality games, which company chief Gabe Newell describes as full games rather than tech demos.

At a media round-table at the company's Bellevue, Washington headquarters yesterday, Newell said that the games represent a second generation of VR releases, which will be longer and more in-depth than previous demo-like experiences.

He refused to be drawn on the nature of the games but said that they were all very different from one another. It seems unlikely that they will be based on Half-Life or Team Fortress. Newell said his teams had tried to create VR games based on Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2, but that they weren't fun on the VR platform.

When asked if the games are being built for Valve's own Source 2 engine or on Unity, Newell replied, "both."

Valve is heavily invested in VR, having created the Vive platform along with manufacturer HTC. Newell said he is still developing new hardware for Vive, including the knuckle controllers previously seen at the Steam Dev Day last year. Apart from series of VR demos called The Lab, launched last year, the last full, original name released by Valve was 2013’s DOTA 2. Valve says it will not be adding to The Lab, and does not see it as an ongoing project.

Newell said that while hardware improvements will come in the next two years — particularly in the field of head-mounted displays — price decreases aren't likely, as VR is largely aimed at a niche market of gamers with powerful PCs. He said that chip manufacturers should get more involved in marketing VR, as they are likely to be major beneficiaries of any emerging mass market.

Valve also revealed that Steam reported an 86 percent VR user growth in terms of monthly active users in the second half of last year, and that 30 VR apps have made more than $250,000 in Steam revenue so far.

Polygon will run Newell's full interview on Monday.

Valve is developing three full-length VR games in Unity and Source 2


The words "half," "life," and "three" were not mentioned. Please stop asking.

Mark Walton (UK) - 2/10/2017, 6:37 AM

Setting aside Valve's VR mini-game collection The Lab, it's been over three years since the once mighty games developer released its last full-fat video game—the e-sports MOBA Dota 2. Its last single-player, story-driven game, Portal 2, was released in 2011. So expectations have been low for the announcement of any new Valve games, with even the fabled Half-Life 3 relegated to mere Internet meme.

It comes as something of a surprise, then, to hear Valve confirm it isn't just working on one new game—it's working on three. Moreover, while all three games are being developed specifically for VR, they won't be short, throwaway experiences like those in The Lab. They are, according to Valve founder and padre to PC gaming Gabe Newell, "full games."

"Right now we're building three VR games," Newell told reporters at a roundtable discussion at its offices in Seattle. "When I say we're building three games, we're building three full games, not experiments."

Details on the games were kept secret, although Newell did confirm they're being built in both Unity and the company's own Source 2 game engine.

Newell went on to discuss Valve's development philosophy for VR, reiterating previous comments that the company sees VR as a true replacement for the keyboard and mouse that gamers have "been stuck with mouse and keyboard for a reeeaaally [sic] long time." Taking a leaf from Nintendo's playbook, he also made clear that VR games development and hardware development go hand-in-hand.

"One of the questions you might be asking is 'Why in the world would you be making hardware?'" Newell said. "What we can do now is we can be designing hardware at the same time that we're designing software. This is something that [Nintendo's Shigeru] Miyamoto has always had. He's had the ability to think about what the input device is and design a system while he designs games. Our sense is that this will actually allow us to build much better entertainment experiences for people."

While Valve remains optimistic about the future of VR, numerous—if unconfirmed—projected figures from research firms like SuperData point towards lower than expected sales for all headsets. PlayStation VR was said to have shifted roughly 745,000 units last year, nearly double that of HTC's Vive at 420,000 units, with the Oculus Rift apparently trailing behind in third place at 355,000 units.

Upcoming headsets like Lenovo’s Windows Holographic headset promise to broaden the market by bringing the cost down for consumers. The headset is currently pegged for a £350 launch price—although Newell is not entirely convinced this will necessarily increase VR's install-base.

"If you took the existing VR systems and made them 80 per cent cheaper there's still not a huge market, right?," said Newell. "There's still not an incredibly compelling reason for people to spend 20 hours a day in VR. Once you've got something, the thing that really causes millions of people to be excited about it, then you start worrying about cost reducing. It's sort of the old joke that premature cost reduction is the root of all evil."

He added: "We're actually going to go from this weird position where VR right now is kind of low-res, to being in a place where VR is actually higher res than just about anything else, with much higher refresh rates than you're going to see on either desktops or phones. You'll actually see the VR industry sort of leapfrogging pretty much any other display technology in terms of those characteristics. It's probably not obvious from the first generation of products, but you'll start to see that happening in 2018-2019."

Which is all well and good. But for PC gamers that grew up with a Valve that made groundbreaking games like Half-Life and Portal, hardware talk isn't so compelling. Here's hoping that, whatever those three games it's working on might be, they live up to the developer's commanding legacy.

This post originated on Ars Technica UK