The creator of Half-Life recruits troops for a “super secret game”

Starting on 9/3 in an event for Artifact, Valve revealed its plans to continue developing and releasing new games after years of focusing on building Steam and hardware. The keynote, chaired by Gabe Newell, succinctly stated, “Now we’re going to start shipping the game again.”
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Gabe sums it up, over the years they’ve been behind the success of many games from other manufacturers, like PUBG – the most popular game on Steam right now, for example. The effort the Valve team put into building the Steam platform and hardware is huge, but that doesn’t spawn new games for the unit.

Gabe confirmed that he will continue to build hardware, but will continue to design “software” from now on. This means the release date of Artifact 2018 will mark Valve’s return to the new game publishing industry, the first time since 2013 when Dota 2 born. Among the new games, the community predicts at least 3 virtual reality games.
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This is the result of years of Valve building an open ecosystem, including hardware and technology research. Thanks to that, Valve now has the ability to release games on multiple platforms, for example for VR games there will be at least one open platform HTC Vive. “There is hardly a hardware area that we have trouble getting into right now,” said Gabe. We used to envy those who had the ability to choose controllers, graphics or other elements for each new game, but now we can too.”

Going back to the new game theme Valve is talking about, they obviously won’t be Artifact. Artifact just a stepping stone game in Valve’s return to the market. However, unfortunately Half-Life 3 also not mentioned.

After the announcement in March, Valve recently set up a website to remind the community of new projects. The website re-introduces games from the company’s “prehistoric” era, with the affirmation “We have many new game projects, in addition to some of which have been revealed, the rest is top secret”.
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Through the recruitment message on the new website, Valve proves they are really serious. More specifically, the unit is recruiting level designers who are able to “build 3D game worlds”, “use entity scenarios to build storylines for gameplay”. Recruiting personnel to build plot scenes (cinematic) is a remarkable move by Valve, because they seem to have forgotten this element since 2011 with Portal 2.

In addition, the position of content writing is also actively recruited by Valve. A large list is open to candidates with experience in “linear game scripting and cinematic scenes”, to those with experience in film, television and copy writing being considered. This is clearly Valve’s massive addition to replace the departure of many cult writers in recent years.​