Valve CEO and co-founder Gabe Newell could just make Half-Life games every few years and find success. The company’s fans are about as dedicated as they come, so doing this style of single-player development would likely result in a big pay day. However, the industry mainstay enjoys experimenting with different types of development, and he recently spoke to The Washington Post about his company’s business strategy.
“I just think that we're more confident now and we've got that experience in lots of things,” Newell admitted. “When we started out we were a single-player video game company that could have been really successful just doing Half-Life sequel after Half-Life sequel, but we collectively said let's try to make multi-player games even though there's never been a commercial successful multi-player game.”
Sure, multiplayer games like Left 4 Dead are great, but it would be nice to at least have one new Half-Life game every five years or so. At this point, we’re just not sure when the elusive Half-Life 3 will enter our lives.