It looks like the folks at Valve don’t have thick skin when it comes to fans pointing out what they see. In a recent report, we learn that Valve developers can’t quite handle hearing that the company “doesn’t make games anymore” in that Half-Life: Alyx’s designer Greg Coomer and animator James Benson express that it hurts to hear fans say that Valve doesn’t make games anymore.
While it’s unclear if the joke “Valve can’t count to three” will draw tears from the team, what is for certain is that saying “Valve doesn’t make games anymore” will bring down spirits at said company.
When talking to the website that houses the notorious Dean Takahashi, VentureBeat, Coomer and Benson cover a wide variety of things. And one of the many topics in the interview, as spotted by website wccftech.com, highlights how the devs deal with the “Valve makes no games” sentiment. With that said, here’s Coomer and Benson’s response:
“Yeah, I think it was [a frustrating sentiment to see]. Inside Valve, there’s a story to tell about how many things were going on. Some of that, I think, is beyond the scope of our current conversation. But I would just say that on many fronts, there were game projects that we were exploring. There were many game projects that were just ongoing and public that are these big service titles that have so many users on Steam playing them. And a lot of work going on just on the Steam platform. We were simultaneously becoming a hardware company to some degree. We were accomplishing things on a lot of fronts, and shipping games that entire time. But simultaneously, we completely understood where that sentiment was coming from.
There’s a set of people who, like many of us, consider their very favorite things that Valve has produced to be the games that have a ton of craftsmanship and attention to detail and a single-player component. Those things were not coming out of our studio for a long time. To us, that didn’t feel like it was because we had decided to stop making them, or that we really had stopped making them. We were just figuring out what’s the right next thing to do, and how we should get back to some of our most important franchises like Half-Life. Figuring out a way to do that that made sense, like Alyx does, we think, really was a relief, to get back to that. When we were announcing the title, we had a little bit of trepidation about how it would be received, because of the VR medium and everything, but we weren’t worried about whether or not we had actually returned to making that kind of title, because we had a lot of confidence in the game that we had ended up being able to produce.”
Aside from the devs admitting that it was frustrating from the inside to hear and that it hurts when gamers and fans go on about Valve not making games, the website cites Coomer and Benson saying that they understand where that sentiment is coming from when thinking about the whole thing.
Moreover, the publication site covers the pair promising that it won’t be long before Valve gets around to delivering another “core game.”
In the meantime, now that Half-Life: Alyx is out, Valve is focusing on delivering more Artifact news while working on a reboot of the digital card game.
While we wait to find out if the new Artifact reboot is considered another “core game,” you can learn more about Valve and this interview by hitting up wccftech.com.