No one really knows what Valve are doing in their Washington headquarters, I mean, it’s definitely not upgrading Counter Strike: Global Offensive to the Source 2 engine, so what could they possibly be doing? A lot of people seem to forget that trying to establish a brand new platform for games is also something they could be doing. Alan Yates, Hardware Engineer at Valve, has revealed on Reddit that one third of the company are involved in VR.
“I was super fortunate to start at Valve right around the time Michael Abrash had begun the AR/VR research team,” Yates explains. “It was a much smaller team then than it is now, it has since grown to encompass about a third of the company, but the key individuals that solved most of the really hard technological problems and facilitated this generation of consumer headsets are still here working on the next generation.”
Yes, we realise Valve may not be focusing on Half Life 3, so you can get those jokes out of the way. Back in 2013, Valve confirmed they had approximately 330 employees. Valve are rumoured to have around 350-380 employees as of last year, which means there must be around 200+ employees working on other projects.
There’s no way to know if Valve are working on any new games or if they are simply content with updating their existing games. Of course, we’d all like to think they are going to create that magical third game in the series… Portal 3, Left 4 Dead 3, maybe even Team Fortress 3.