As part of a press briefing at Valve’s office in Seattle today, company founder Gabe Newell has been discussing the state of the company and its foray into VR, confirming three new VR-specific games in development at Valve.
Talking to a number of press outlets, including Gamasutra, as part of a detailed roundtable on VR at Valve, Newell explained of Valve’s foray into the space with the VIVE – and continued hardware experimentation:
“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 Miyamoto has always had, right?”
Newell continued: “[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.”
Newell and team did later confirm that these were not smaller experiments, but intended to be new “full games”, as opposed to the vignette-style demonstrations shown in Valve’s The Lab. Valve expects to sell these new games, and is using both Unity and its own Source 2 engine to develop them.
Gamasutra was present at multiple panels as part of this briefing, and will be posting more detailed stories on Valve’s current strategy and work from Newell & colleagues in the near future.