Valve is developing 3 new VR games

Valve Corporation confirmed it's working on three virtual reality games, Eurogamer reported today, expanding upon president and co-founder Gabe Newell's mention of VR games during a Reddit AMA in January.

Newell told press that the developer is currently building three virtual reality games, which aren't just going to be small projects like The Lab or remakes of existing games put into a VR engine.

"When I say we're building three games, we're building three full games, not experiments," he said. "One of the first things we did is we got Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress running in VR, and it was kind of a novelty. That was purely a developer milestone, but there was absolutely nothing compelling about it, the same way nobody's going to buy a VR system so they can watch movies."

While these games aren't VR ports of old Valve games, that doesn't mean they won't fall into Valve's Half-Life/Portal universe. In fact, Newell said in his Reddit AMA that Valve was working on a full-fledged game in the Half-Life/Portal universe.

The three new VR games are being developed in Unity and Valve's Source 2 engines alongside some new hardware experiments beyond Valve's HTC Vive. Newell compared this simultaneous hardware and software development to famous Nintendo game designer and producer Shigeru Miyamoto's development style, Gamasutra reported Thursday.

"[Miyamoto] has had the ability to think about what the input devices and the design of systems should be like while he's trying to design games," Newell said. "Our sense is that that's going to allow us to actually build much better entertainment experiences for people."

Valve's interest in hardware isn't just about making money, Newell said.

"So the idea isn't like, oh, 'We suddenly thought we could make more money by building hardware,' because hardware's actually traditionally been a lousy low-margin business," he said.

In typical Valve fashion, the information about the new projects is pretty vague, but at least we've confirmed the Newell is capable of saying the word "three."