Newell says "Artifact is the first of several games that are going to be coming from us." We know three of these titles will be in VR.
Newell also explained why Valve have been focused on hardware and tech over the past several years. It all stems from concern that companies like Microsoft and Facebook had been hoping to emulate "the kind of closed, high margin ecosystem that Apple's done," whether with Windows, phones, or VR. "That started to really worry us, because we thought that the strength of the PC is about its openness... so we started to make some investments to offset that."
Those investments have ensured that we have at least one open platform for VR in the HTC Vive, but have also bolstered Valve's hardware design expertise.
"Now there's pretty much no project in the hardware space that we wouldn't be comfortable taking on," Newell says. "We've always been a little bit jealous of companies like Nintendo. When Miyamoto is sitting down and thinking about the next version of Zelda or Mario, he's thinking what is the controller going to look like, what sort of graphics and other capabilities. He can introduce new capabilities like motion input because he controls both of those things... That is something we've been jealous of, and that's something that you'll see us taking advantage of subsequently."
