'Half-Life 3' announcement: Why people think it's happening

There's probably never been another unannounced video game with more hype around it than Half-Life 3, the theoretical follow-up to Valve's seminal first-person shooter series that has been mostly dormant since 2007. Now, as Kotaku and others have noted, a lot of folks online are theorizing that we're actually going to see or hear about it soon.

If you've been following games for a long time, that's probably pretty hard to believe. We've all been down this road before with Half-Life 3. However, there is a tiny bit of smoke to this fire. For starters, the series got an injection of life back in 2020 with the launch of Half-Life: Alyx for VR headsets, a game whose ending has major story implications for the future of the series, assuming it has a future. Data-miners also identified files for something in Valve's database called "HLX" in 2024, and further reporting on that has concluded that it is a new Half-Life game.

The simplest and most believable theory going around is that Valve is going to launch Half-Life 3 next year alongside its new Steam Machine home console. For more than two decades, new Half-Life releases have always been meant to sell you something else alongside the game. Half-Life 2 was the first blockbuster release on Steam, Half-Life 2: Episode 2 was bundled with Portal and Team Fortress 2, and Half-Life: Alyx was a system seller for the Valve Index VR headset. If Valve wants to get people interested in the Steam Machine, marketing it alongside a new Half-Life game would definitely do the trick.

You say there are two games, but I only see one, Valve. Credit: Screenshot: Valve/Steam

Beyond that, there's an upcoming releases page specifically for Valve products on Steam. While the "Games" tab only shows Valve's in-development multiplayer shooter Deadlock right now, there's actually a little "2" next to it, meaning there may be one more unannounced game alongside that. As Kotaku noted, some believed that Nov. 18 would be the day of the announcement because that was when Alyx was announced several years ago, but that day came and went with nothing.

There's a slight (in my opinion) possibility that the game is announced at The Game Awards in December, which is something people online have also speculated about. While that is the only big game announcement event in the near future, it also stands to reason that Valve doesn't need anyone else's platform for Half-Life 3. It would be, by a wide margin, the most seismic video game announcement in more than a decade. Valve could just throw a trailer up on YouTube in the middle of the night, and it would still break the internet.

Fingers crossed we get some kind of resolution to all of this in the next year or so.