Valve is gearing up to release Source 2 but it won’t be useful for everyone

Valve has been working on its Source 2 engine for a long time now and while the engine has popped up in the likes of Dota 2, we have yet to see a game truly showcase what the new engine is capable of. Fortunately, it seems like Valve is currently working towards making Source 2 available to all developers, though Gabe Newell warns that its feature set ‘won't be for everyone'.

During a recent roundtable interview with the press, filmed by Valve News Network, Gabe Newell talked a bit about Source 2, saying that “if it's useful for people, it's available for them to use”, before explaining that it won't necessarily be a good alternative to something like Unity for a lot of developers.

Gabe begins talking about Source 2 at around 27:20

“For us, it’s insanely useful – it does exactly what we need an engine to do and it’s evolving in the directions that we think are important. It’s kind of an industrial-strength solution. For our developers it works great, for other developers it’s not nearly as useful as Unity. So it’s sort of like, it’s here if people want it.”

Newell went on to explain that Source 2 is intended to be part of Steam's toolset, which will either be useful to developers or not quite what they are looking for. Either way, Valve isn't planning on making money off of the Source 2 engine, so we may see plenty of developers experiment with it as we did the original Source engine.

KitGuru Says: With Valve currently focussing on virtual reality, it would make sense for Source 2 to contain a lot of VR-specific features. Still, with Dota 2 already running in the engine, it seems like it will be a good fit for traditional games too. 

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