Except for the maintenance of games oriented to the community and eSports, such as CS:GO and DotA 2, Valve has been many years inactive from development of video games. The Half-Life company has focused on Steam, moving from being one of the most prominent producers of the scene to one focused on services.

However, in recent months the company has expressed interest in developing new titles, and Artifact will be its next release. In the context of Artifact promotion, it has been reiterated that it is time for Valve to return to the creation of video games.

Artifact is a card game based on the DotA universe. With a release date at the end of 2018, the development features Richard Garfield, creator of Magic: The Gathering. Brandon Reinhart, programmer at Artifact, is the one who talked about Valve's situation.

“A bunch of investment we've done over the past few years hasn't really been exceptionally visible to customers playing our games. We spent a lot of time improving customer service on Steam. That was a hard problem, and it took a bunch of people a bunch of time to work on.”

However, according to Reinhart, Valve enters a new mindset. "Now we're in a place where we're able to, as a company, invest and focus a lot more on games again. To deliver a bunch of high quality games that show we're actually working really hard.”

 

New Steam Games

Undoubtedly, Steam has become a priority platform, which places Valve in a very advantageous situation if it decides to produce video games in the conventional terms. Delimiting their releases to Steam, for example, and taking into account the quality of past works such as Portal or Half-Life, can be a very important exclusive, not only to deal with video game consoles, but other PC gaming stores such as Origin .

In these years of drought, and as Marc Laidlaw, screenwriter of Half-Life recalled, the vast majority of talent from the company's golden age are outside the studio, so Valve sees the need to rearm ranks. One of the first decisions in this regard has been to absorb Camposanto, creators of Firewatch, and In the Valley of Gods, the game they have in development, will be released under the seal of the Steam company.