Valve is apparently working on several games right now, according to Greg Coomer who is a designer at the company. The Steam Deck already delivered a surprise release with Aperture Desk Job, a brief instructional game for the console sharing a setting with Portal. It’s a far cry from being Portal 3, but the company’s first game since Half-Life Alyx.
Of course, this is Valve, so this isn’t exactly a rock-solid assurance - who knows how many years any of these projects are from being finished, or how many of them will ever actually be released? Valve’s output of mainline games has really tapered off since Dota 2, with the years since then sprinkled with releases like Artifact and Alyx as well as a number of collaborations, spin-offs and ports. Valve has been more successful in its experimental ventures than many others, and luckily the company has plenty of cash to burn. Even when its experiments fail, like Steam Machines, stumble and trip like Link and the Steam Controller or receive praise while staying niche like the Index, it doesn’t even dent the ridiculous amount of revenue generated by Steam itself. While we love the kind of innovative approach the legendary company has taken with PC gaming, trying to push it beyond its current comfort zone while encroaching on console territory repeatedly - the Steam Deck is the latest valiant attempt against Nintendo’s monopoly of the handheld market, a battlefield where many have fallen across the epochs - hearing that this game company is actually making games is welcome. At this point nobody seriously expects a Half-Life sequel, but naturally the jokes have already kicked off, with many fans hoping that “multiple” games does not mean “three” games, lest the Valve curse be triggered again. Coomer did not give any further details about what these games may be, of course. This all comes from a recent interview Coomer gave, which mainly focused on the Steam Deck itself. Topics touched upon included a more in-depth look at how Valve will approach optimizing and patching games to make them more compatible with the handheld PC, and what future iterations on the hardware are planned. The Deck is definitely a revolutionary new take on PC gaming, and works a hell of a lot better than anyone would have expected. Valve, with no prior console making experience (the Steam Machines hardly count) managed to create a singular piece of hardware that crammed an actual gaming PC into a form factor barely bigger than a Nintendo Switch, and that’s frankly amazing if you stop and think about it. A resounding victory for gaming as a whole and PC gaming in particular, the Steam Deck is definitely something we hope will take off and become a broader, mainstream hit - especially considering the current hardware market. Sort out some of the kinks, refine the form factor and let the price mellow a bit in a hopefully less-crippled chip economy, and I just might make a future iteration of the Deck my go-to gaming platform; and that is coming from a lifelong PC gamer. You can absolutely bet that all of these upcoming “exciting” games that Valve is working on currently will be right at home on the deck - let’s just hope we don’t enter the new millennium before any of them actually materialize.
