Valve has confirmed that it’s in the process of developing three ‘full VR’ games, built from the ground up to offer a fully realised virtual reality experience.
Gabe Newell reiterated what he’d hinted at during a recent Reddit AMA, confirming the news to Eurogamer during a media roundtable at the studio’s Bellevue, Washington office.
He said:
Right now, we’re building three VR games. When I say we’re building three games, we’re building three full games, not experiments.
Ever the coy devil, Newell wouldn’t say anything about the games themselves, but did note that they’re being built in Source 2 and Unity.
He continued:
One of the questions you might be asking is ‘Why in the world would you be making hardware?’ What we can do now is we can be designing hardware at the same time that we’re designing software. This is something that Miyamoto has always had. He’s had the ability to think about what the input device is and design a system while he designs games. Our sense is that this will actually allow us to build much better entertainment experiences for people.
Newell believes that a VR game should be built with VR in mind, suggesting that the format won’t be successful if developers simply transplant an existing game into a VR space.
What this suggests then, is that the three new games from Valve will indeed be entirely new, so we probably shouldn’t expect Half-Life VR.
By all accounts it seems that Gaben and Valve are cooking up something truly ambitious, with the man himself confirming he doesn’t care about low-end VR and wants to take full advantage of the tech.
He explained:
If you took the existing VR systems and made them 80 per cent cheaper there’s still not a huge market, right? There’s still not an incredibly compelling reason for people to spend 20 hours a day in VR. Once you’ve got something, the thing that really causes millions of people to be excited about it, then you start worrying about cost reducing. It’s sort of the old joke that premature cost reduction is the root of all evil.
Whatever these VR games turn out to be, there’s every chance that Valve could be putting out the first Virtual Reality games that take the format from ‘cool novelty’ to ‘truly unmissable’.