highlights

entire AMA

In response to a question about Valve’s plans for its Source 2 engine

We are continuing to use Source 2 as our primary game development environment. Aside from moving Dota 2 to the engine recently, we are are using it as the foundation of some unannounced products. We would like to have everyone working on games here at Valve to eventually be using the same engine. We also intend to continue to make the Source 2 engine work available to the broad developer community as we go, and to make it available free of charge.

In response — a very vague response — to a question about whether Valve will continue the Left 4 Dead franchise

Products are usually the result of an intersection of technology that we think has traction, a group of people who want to work on that, and one of the game properties that feels like a natural playground for that set of technology and design challenges.

When we decided we needed to work on markets, free to play, and user generated content, Team Fortress seemed like the right place to do that. That work ended up informing everything we did in the multiplayer space.

Left 4 Dead is a good place for creating shared narratives.

When Newell says his favorite single-player game from Valve is Portal 2 (and not a Half-Life game)

The issue with Half-Life for me is that I was involved in a much higher percentage of the decisions about the games, so it's hard for me to look at them as anything other than a series of things I regret. There's no information in my response about what we'll do in the future. It's simply easier for me to be a fan of things that in which I was less directive.

If you are involved in a game, everything ends up being a set of trade-offs. Anything in a game is a sacrifice of things not in the game. I just feel those more personally about Half-Life for a bunch of reasons.

And Xen.

Newell’s answers to some other questions were more curt, likely because he’s asked them all the time. These included:

-Any chance of a new IP that takes place in the half-life/portal universe? “Yep”

-Is Valve still working on any fully-fledged single player games? “Yes”

-Wasn't there a movie (or a set of 2 movies) coming in that universe by Valve and JJ Abrams? “Yep. They’re coming.” (That project was announced back in 2013.)