As criticized as acclaimed, Gabe Newell remains an important figure in the video game industry. He is somewhat of a rockstar who no longer needs to be presented. It's been a while since we last heard him in the media, however, he has been recently interviewed by the New Zealand media outlet TVNZ. Valve's dad lives in New Zealand since the start of the pandemic.
In this interview, which you can find in full on the TVNZ website, he commented about a variety of subjects, including the controversy surrounding Cyberpunk 2077, and he seems to be on the side of CD Projekt Red:
There are aspects of the game that are just brilliant, and it shows a tremendous amount of work — it's unfair to throw stones at any other developer because just getting something as complex and ambitious as that out the door is pretty amazing.
When it comes to games developed by Valve, he has remained rather elusive. Although a new installment of the Half-Life series was released in 2020, not all players could enjoy it since Half-Life Alyx is only playable in virtual reality. The game has brought the license back to life but many players who did not have the necessary equipment felt aggrieved and are still waiting for the sequel to Half-Life 2, or even that of Portal 2.
While he doesn't reveal a lot of details, we now know that there are new games currently in development at Valve, and it seems that they are focusing on single-player games.
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.
It remains to be seen what Valve has in store for us in the future, but even if the words remain vague, this interview suggests that we may hear from these games in a not-so-distant future.
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