Portal and Half-Life writer Erik Wolpaw was recently featured in the latest episode of Simon Parkin’s My Perfect Console podcast, where he talked about many topics, chiefly his long-time career at Valve.
Wolpaw joined Valve in 2006 after co-writing Psychonauts at Double Fine. He is credited as a writer on Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Portal, Left 4 Dead, Portal 2, and Artifact. By that time, he had left the company to work on Psychonauts 2, though that didn’t really pan out and he came back to Valve once again to work on Half-Life: Alyx.
It’s fair to say his experience at the Bellevue, Washington-based games company is rather extensive. Hence, it’s interesting to hear him talk about the famously unique internal structure and how it potentially gets in the way of making new games, including Portal 3, which he’d very much love to do.
The real reason is that in a flat structure like Valve’s, there is an opportunity cost to doing anything. Whatever is going on at Valve right now requires the dedication and participation of the people working on it, and it is voluntary. I would like to make a Portal 3, but I understand.
When asked by Parkin whether the company had mostly given up making games due to the success of the Steam platform, which has been a popular argument among gamers for years, he replied that’s not the case.
I don’t think so. I mean, to whatever extent you appreciated Half-Life: Alyx, we released that. I think long tail games affected that in a way that is maybe more impactful than Steam. Keeping CS: Go and Dota 2 going, for a small company…The thing is, Valve is not a giant company. I think people sometimes think it is because of the outside influence of Steam, but it’s not really that many people. It takes manpower to keep CS: GO going; it takes manpower to keep Dota 2 going. And the freeform nature of Valve means there are a lot of experiments that simply fail. So, things are happening. If you were inside, you’d think stuff was always going on, because it is. It’s a manpower problem. You have to pick what you’re working on and time is limited.
Wolpaw ended his take by stating that as much as he loved making those games, if he had to choose between them and Steam, he’d pick the latter.
Of course, one could easily wonder why Valve doesn’t just elect to expand its company to accommodate live service games, Steam, and new game projects. They certainly have the money to do so, so it would appear that they’re not that eager to grow much bigger.
At any rate, Portal fans can access a beautiful RTX remaster of the first installment, while Half-Life fans who are not into VR can play Alyx on their regular screens from beginning to end thanks to a mod. When it comes to new games, Valve is planning to launch Counter-Strike 2 in the Summer, though it remains to be seen whether there’s any hope of ever getting Half-Life 3, Portal 3, or Left 4 Dead 3 – they seem to have a problem with that number.
