Aside from Half-Life 3, is there any vaporware left? Games we’ve been waiting a decade or more for, like Final Fantasy XV and The Last Guardian, dropped in 2016. The butt of vaporware jokes for a decade, Duke Nukem Forever, has been out for years. Even titles that were little more than fantasies, like Shenmue III, are in the works. That leaves just one pixellated cheese standing alone: Half-Life 3. But an anonymous interview with a Valve employee seems to confirm our worst fears.
Game Informer ran an interview with an anonymous Valve employee, which, while you do need to season this with a little salt, says it’s never happening:
There’s something with that third episode that isn’t sitting right with Gabe and other people at Valve. Ultimately it just starves to death. The people that tried to give it life find themselves better off working on other projects.
While there’s reason to be skeptical, like the fact that Valve is a notoriously close-lipped company and will likely never confirm anything from this interview, the issue appears to be how Valve works. Valve famously does not have any managers; the company instead runs projects based on who’s interested in them and lets those project organize themselves along those lines. But like any company, there are leaders, and the overall lack of interest from the top in a new Half-Life appears to be the issue.
Likely not helping matters is that Valve has Steam to manage. Steam is only growing, breaking a concurrent user record just a few days ago, and the service is so notorious for customer service problems, a Congressman tried to use them as an excuse for spending campaign finance money on PC games. So Valve both doesn’t need the money Half-Life 3 would deliver, and probably is too busy selling everybody else’s games to make it anyway. Maybe Valve should hire some subcontractors to make the actual games?
(via VG 24/7)