The Valve CEO shared some interesting information regarding Valve’s current games in development and even gave his thoughts on Cyberpunk 2077.
Newell has been in New Zealand for almost a year now, after he turned his ten-day holiday into an indefinite stay due to the Coronavirus pandemic. He even joked about relocating his game developers there after he realised how much he enjoyed it there. In an interview with 1 News, he said there has even been some “strong interest” from Valve employees about making the move, but nothing is planned just yet.
“You don’t want to uproot a bunch of families, have them come here, and then the situation gets a bunch better and then they have to turn around and go back,” he said. “So that’s why getting a better handle on how long the epidemic is going to be affecting our operational decisions is important to that.”
He also talked about moving major esports tournaments to New Zealand and touched on the topic of Half-Life 3 and a secret project codenamed “Citadel”. While Newell refused to give an specific information about them, he did confirm that Valve do have new projects in the works, and mentioned a renewed enthusiasm for game development after the success of Half-Life Alyx.
“We definitely have games in development that we’re going to be announcing. It’s fun to ship games,” he said. “Alyx was great. To be back doing single player games, that created a lot of momentum inside the company to do more of that.”
On the subject of Cyberpunk 2077, Newell said that he “had a lot of fun” playing the PC version and has “a lot of sympathy with a situation that every game developer finds themselves in.”
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