Erik Wolpaw is a legend in video games, both for his onetime work as a journalist, but also his more influential and far-reaching work as Valve’s video game writer. Today he has some interesting things to say about his one-time full time employer.
In a recent interview, Wolpaw clarified that he was joking about making Portal 3. Most gamers didn’t seem to take him seriously anyway, dataminers would be the first to know if Valve was seriously up to something.
However, Wolpaw spoke about what kind of company Valve is, and why he can’t just tell his old employers they need to start that project from scratch.
Wolpaw worked for Valve from 2004 to 2017. In his time as a full time writer, he wrote Half-Life 2: Episodes One and Two, the Portal games, and co-wrote Left 4 Dead. He briefly left to work on Psychonauts 2, though that deal eventually fell through.
Wolpaw did return to Valve, but is now a part-time contractor. In this new interview, Wolpaw sheds light as to why they made that arrangement as well.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, this is what Wolpaw said:
“The thing is, Valve is not a giant company. I think people sometimes think it is because of the outsize influence of Steam, but it’s not really that many people.
It takes manpower to keep Dota going, it takes manpower to keep CS:GO going, and the freeform nature of Valve means that there are a lot of experiments that simply fail. So things are happening. If you were inside Valve, you would think that stuff was always going on, because it is.
And as much as I enjoy the things I worked on at Valve, and my time at Valve, and it’s important to me, if I had to choose between Valve’s games and Steam – which I feel is the most democratising technology that ever came out to allow people to create games [and] get them in front of people – I guess I would choose Steam.
Take everything I say with a grain of salt, because much like anyone entrenched in some system I don’t have the 100,000-foot view, my view is very subjective. I think that the problem people always [think it is] – and I’ve done it myself, more joking than anything else – is a money problem, but it’s not a money problem, it’s a manpower problem.
You have to pick what you’re going to work on, and time is limited.”
So it seems, Valve took a lot of risks when they decided to make Half-Life: Alyx. Subsequently, if Valve plans to make a real Half-Life 3 or Portal 3 in the future, they would have to restructure their entire company around such a move.
But of course, as we already know, Valve decided to make precisely that move just recently, when they announced they would finally make a proper Counter-Strike 2. Wolpaw’s comments shouldn’t be taken as an indication as those sequels are never happening, or for that matter, that Valve will never make new games.
What it does mean is Valve won’t be moving on such things unless they’re willing to take huge risks and invest a lot of the company into it.
It probably also means Valve has put a lot into Counter-Strike 2. Hopefully, it meets all our expectations and more.
