Many people are starting to give up hope of ever seeing Half-Life 3, after Valve has left us waiting for what feels like an eternity for news on a potential sequel.
In a recent interview with the Washington Post, Valve's CEO and co-founder Gabe Newell has shed some light on the matter, explaining why the studio doesn't just keep churning out sequels and have taken a different route:
"When we started out we were a single-player video game company that could have been really successful just doing Half-Life sequel after Half-Life sequel, but we collectively said let's try to make multi-player games even though there's never been a commercial successful multi-player game."
"Then we tried to do Steam. There were a bunch of people internally who thought Steam was a really bad idea, but what they didn't think was that they would tell the people who were working on Steam what to do with their time. They were like "that's what you want to do with your time, that's fine, but we're going to spend our time working on Half-Life 2. We think you're kind of wasting your time, but it's your time to waste."
"In retrospect, it was a great idea, right? So the key thing was that people bear the consequences of their own choices, so if I spend my time on it the only person's time I'm wasting is mine. Over time, I think people sort of recognize how useful it is for people to vote with their time. There is a huge amount of wisdom in people's decisions about what they personally want to work on next."
According to Newell, it's the drive towards creating value within the company that has pushed them away from Half-Life 3: "If somebody becomes the group manager of X, they're going to really resist it when X is not what you want to do in the next round of games. You don't want them to sort of burrow into that - you want them to recognize that being really good at Half-Life level design is not as nearly as valued as thinking of how to design social multi-player experiences. You've had them feel like they have an organization and title tied up to something when the key is to just continue to follow where the customers are leading."
While "customers" are most certainly desperate for another instalment in the Half-Life series, the thinking at Valve appears to be similar to that of Respawn Entertainment, who are focussing on the multiplayer for Titanfall as opposed to a single player campaign (in order to get maximum value from the time they spend developing the game instead of investing time in a single player story that players won't play for very long). It sounds like something similar is going on at Valve, and that the studio are trying to find a balance between value and consumer demand. Shame, because we're among those who'd definitely be up for getting our hands on Half-Life 3.