Longtime Valve employee Greg Coomer said that making games is still “very important” to Valve, but I feel like I’ve heard that before.

Valve has made some very big, influential games over the past 25 years, but not many games. You can literally count them on the fingers of one hand – and that number mostly consists of sequels (Dota 2), spinoffs (Dota Underlords), and tech demos of new hardware (Aperture Desk Job). From a business perspective, this isn’t really a problem because Steam is the proverbial money printer go brrr, but an awful lot of gamers would definitely be happy if Valve could go back to making the games they love like they used to.

In what must be good news for long-suffering fans, Valve’s Greg Coomer told Famitsu Google Translate that Valve remains deeply committed to making games, and in fact has several projects in the works right now.

“Valve has a lot of games in development. We will continue to release games,” Coomer said. “Game development is very important to Valve. I don’t know the exact numbers, but we are the ratio of customer employees is high. A lot of people are involved”.

And yes, that commitment extends to Half-Life, though to be clear, Coomer didn’t say anything specific about a Half-Life game in development. However, he said that Valve likes the setting and wants to “continue to explore the Half-Life universe.”

“Half-Life: Alyx was a really fun game,” Coomer said. .

“In addition, there are many challenges in virtual reality, and solving them was an interesting task. Technological innovations always accompany half-Life works, so this was a big step in this sense as well … Half-Life: Alyx is a sign of that , that Valve still has something to say about this world”.

Of course, Coomer’s statement will be worth taking, well, with as much salt as we feel is appropriate, because this is not the first time that someone from Valve has made such a statement, while there is no actual new game coming from Valve, it is in the middle of a barren wasteland. Let’s review what happened:

“Yes.” – Gabe Newell when asked during an AMA if Valve is still making single player games. (January 2017)
“We’re currently building three VR games … When I say we’re building three games, we’re building three full-fledged games, not experiments.” Gabe Newell, strongly implying that these games are bigger and better than The Lab tech demo that Valve made for the HTC Vive. (February 2017)
“Artifact is the first of several games coming from us. So that’s kind of good news. Hooray! Valve is starting to ship games again.” Gabe Newell during the Artifact presentation at Valve HQ. (March 2018)
“We’re now in a position where we can invest a lot more as a company and focus on games again … To deliver a bunch of high-quality games that show we’re really working hard.” Gabe Newell, denying that it’s a common assumption that everyone at Valve is just screwing around all day. (August 2018)
“There are definitely games in development that we’ll be announcing. It’s fun to release games.” Gabe Newell on Half-Life Influence: Alyx on Valve’s interest in making new games. (January 2021)
“There are several games in development at Valve right now, and I think they’re pretty exciting.” Greg Coomer, emphasizing that Valve has a lot more in the pipeline than just the Aperture Desk Job. (March 2022)
To be fair to Valve, there is a lot going on. Steam is still breaking concurrent user records(opens in new tab) and Steam Deck(opens in new tab) looks like it will be the legitimate hardware success that Valve has been chasing for years. Still, you can’t ignore the fact that we’ve heard this hiss many times before without seeing the steak, and I have no doubt that it will happen again, almost certainly before we get any new games from Valve. -from.