Dota 2 card game "the first of several games" coming from Valve

Valve now has the capacity to work on software and hardware simultaneously, co-founder and president Gabe Newell has said, and the company will soon being, "shipping games again."

In a presentation for the new Dota 2 card game Artifact, which was attended by PC Gamer, Newell said that it will be, "the first of several games that are going to be coming from us... Hooray! Valve's going to start shipping games again."

Newell didn't go into detail about what the new games would be, but he did provide some context on Valve's decision to focus on Steam and SteamVR since Dota 2 launched in 2013. Doing so was "an investment in our future," and Valve has emerged from the period with the, "ability to develop hardware and software simultaneously."

"The positive thing about the Vive is, in addition to making sure that nobody created an iOS closed platform for it, was also that it gave us the opportunity to develop our in-house expertise in hardware design," Newell said.

"Five years ago, we didn't have electrical engineers and people who know how to do robots. Now there's pretty much no project in the hardware space that we wouldn't be comfortable taking on. We can design chips if we need to, we can do industrial design, and so on. So that added to that."

PC Gamer has much more from Newell, including his "jealousy" of Nintendo's ability to harmonise its software and hardware, but this isn't the first time Valve has talked about new games being in development. In February last year, Newell said that the company was building, "three full games, not experiments."

In that instance, Newell was talking about VR games, but it isn't clear whether that is the sum total of what Valve is working on. Certainly, the company has lost some of its most important writing staff in recent times, specifically the writers of Half-Life, Left 4 Dead and Portal.