We all know who Gabe Newell is, but for those of you living under a rock - Newell is the boss of Valve, the company behind Half-Life, Portal, Team Fortress, DOTA2, oh - and that little thing called Steam.
Gabe recently said Valve is working on 3 full-length VR games, and these new games won't be small VR demos like The Lab. Newell said that the games will use both Unity and Valve's in-house Source 2 engine to build the new VR games, but Newell also teased that Valve is working on a separate single-player title - something he said in January.
It seems Valve is going down the Nintendo route with the development of what these Valve-built VR games, as Newell had some interesting things to say: "So one of the questions you might ask us is 'Why in the world are we making hardware?' So right now, we're building 3 VR games. And what we can do now is to be designing hardware at the same time that we're designing software. This is something that [Nintendo Representative Director Shigeru] Miyamoto has always had, right?".
Newell continues: "[Miyamoto] has had the ability to think about what the input devices & the design of systems should be like while he's trying to design games. Our sense is that that's going to allow us to actually build much better entertainment experiences for people. So the idea isn't like oh - we suddenly thought we could make more money by building hardware - because hardware's actually traditionally been a lousy low-margin business".
Personally, I love this strategy. This is something I've pondered in previous posts and when I chat with friends or people in the industry - is that Valve could make perfect HTC Vive compatible games that would be the 'standard of VR gaming' type games. It would leave everyone else in its dust, and not only make people want their VR games and HTC Vive headset - but they'll need it.
