Gabe Newell says Valve is going to start shipping games again

Valve’s Gabe Newell casually made an announcement that should excite fans of the company. During a reveal event for Artifact, Valve’s upcoming Dota-themed digital card game, Newell stated that Valve would begin to ships games again (via PC Gamer).

“Artifact is the first of several games that are going to be coming from us. So that’s sort of good news. Hooray! Valve’s going to start shipping games again,” he said.

As for the company’s slow release of games over the last several years, Newell attributes this to focusing on Valve’s digital storefront Steam, as well as investing in new hardware innovation. Going forward, Valve plans to develop hardware and software simultaneously, much like how Nintendo does.

“We’ve always been a little bit jealous of companies like Nintendo,” Newell said. “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. And he can make the hardware look as good as possible because he’s designing the software at the same time that’s really going to take advantage of it. So that is something we’ve been jealous of, and that’s something that you’ll see us taking advantage of subsequently.”

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