Portal Writer Explains Why It Looks Like Valve Barely Does Anything

wccftech.com:

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