With Gabe Newell’s company having made a name for itself in hardware with the Steam Deck, it’s fair to ask what’s next for the company in games.

On the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) website, we can see two entries from Valve for the name Neon Prime. It is certainly not a hardware one, as the category is “Computer game software, electronic game software, video game software, computer game programs downloadable via the internet”, so the company has protected the game’s name with one of its registrations. The second covers a much broader category (organisation of gaming competition, video game education…).

An alleged ex-Valve employee wrote on the ResetEra forum that Valve had previously had a space ship building game similar to FTL that he had once worked on, and that he believed that Neon Prime could refer to this project. He doesn’t know if Valve has wholly trashed the concept or if they may have picked this back up. It’s only a matter of time before the light is shed on what the name means…

However, recall what Gabe Newell (who was then stuck in New Zealand after the company finished Half-Life: Alyx in March 2020 and couldn’t travel back to the US due to the pandemic) told 1 News: “We 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 the company to do more of that. I’ve not spoken about those things [Half-Life/Portal sequels] for a long time, and I hope to continue not to talk about them until they are moot questions. Then we’ll move on to a new set of questions. The nice thing is, by not answering those questions, I avoid the community coming up with new, equally-difficult-to-answer questions.” So he was still deflecting as best he could.

But let’s also not forget that Valve and the number three don’t go together. Half-Life: Alyx is neither Half-Life 3 nor Half-Life 2: Episode 3 (who remembers the first two episodes?!).

Source: VGC