Valve is creating a new Source engine

Well, probably

Nothing sets the gaming community alight with rumours like fresh news coming out of Valve, creators of fan favourites Half Life, Portal, and Team Fortress 2. Managing director Gabe Newell recently held a fan Q&A session, where any topic was fair game apart from one: “So what do you want to know about that’s not Half Life 3?”

Possibly the biggest news to emerge from the session is that Valve may well be working on a new Source engine. When asked about a follow-up to the tech, Newell responded that his team “has been working on engine stuff for quite a while.” He also hinted that Valve might just be waiting for the right game to showcase the technology.

All together now: HALF LIFE 3!

Newell also offered his thoughts on crowd-funding, collaborative development, and the future of the industry: “The direction we’re heading in now, not just Valve, but everybody... one thing you guys may not know is that the community generates about 10 times as much content for TF2 as Valve does. Even though that’s all in pretty primitive stages still, my expectation is that all games will basically be about creating a framework for the community participants to build on top of it.”

It was also confirmed that Valve is working on Steam controllers: “We have three controllers we’re starting to do user testing on now.” This is part of a larger plan to extend the Steam experience. Newell said, “The reason we’re doing controllers is we didn’t think there was enough interesting innovation going on, and there are a bunch of reasons why we think that is happening. Even though we’ve never thought of ourselves as that, now we’re trying to tackle the problems of designing controllers and games at the same time, and we’re also trying to figure out how the Steam experience can extend into living rooms. The whole point is saying the things we all value about PC gaming, consoles should not be the only answer for that, so how do we make living room-friendly PCs?”

The full Q&A can be watched here.

Staff article by David Owen (November 12, 2012) David Owen is a freelance writer who also contributes to VG247, Eurogamer, IGN, and others. He likes Gitaroo Man more than is healthy.