This past weekend, Kotaku caught up with Gabe Newell at the Spike VGAs and asked if he and his company were up to anything special. And the answer was yes:
"We were working on getting Dota 2 running on some tablets… That ended up being kind of a disappointment. But the good news is that tablets are getting faster very quickly, so I think we'll get the kind of performance we want and other game developers want in the near future."
The revelation is noteworthy for a number of reasons. First of all, to say that the upcoming multiplayer online title's pending release is highly anticipated is putting it fairly mildly.
Everyone knows already about the upcoming Windows version, along with one for OS X. But an iteration for tablets is totally unheard of, and widens the scope of the project even more so already (and thusly means even more potential players in the end).
Though this would also mark the very first instance in which Valve has worked on a proper iOS game. The publisher and developer is not exactly a stranger to the platform; there's already a client, but it doesn't do much other than show who among your buddies is online and manage purchases.
Which thus begs the question: how will the game be distributed? Both Apple and Google has their own ecosystems as it pertains to delivering content onto their devices. And while one is certainly less stringent against the other, Steam for Android still seems a bit far-fetched.
But then you have Windows 8 tablets, like the reach. It's basically designed to be a portable version of the desktop operating system. Will a version of Dota 2 simply be a port and that's it, or will it mean something more, much more, in the end?
Perhaps enough for Valve to reconsider its once negative stance of Microsoft's new operating system? Time will only tell.
