Valve’s flagship VR game is still on the way but the release date remains a mystery

Earlier this year, Valve officially launched its own VR headset and hand-tracking controllers. When the headset was initially being shown off to press, Valve did reveal that it would have a ‘flagship’ VR game in 2019 but didn’t offer further details. We are now nearing the final months of the year with little in the way of new information, although one Valve employee has shared a few details.

Last week, Kerry Davis, a Valve developer working on VR software, went back to Digipen, his former school, to give a talk and Q&A session with students. We didn’t get confirmation on what Valve’s first full VR game is, but Davis did reveal a little bit about the behind-the-scenes planning.

Valve News Network managed to get recorded clips of the talk, which you can find in the video above. In the video, Davis talks a bit about Valve’s efforts to implement realistic object interactivity in VR but the really interesting bit was what he had to say about Valve’s internal process.

As Davis says, the teams at Valve “try to avoid the sunk cost fallacy”, so if a group has put a chunk of time into a project, it can be sidelined if it just isn’t working out. In the past, decisions to cancel games has been made after a year or more of work, but nothing at Valve is ever thrown out entirely, as they may want to revisit it some day.

When it comes to deciding when a game is good enough to go out, that is purely down to the developers involved. A game won’t ship unless the team is proud of it and if they aren’t happy with it, then the rest of us won’t get to see it.

In the case of Valve’s upcoming VR game, Davis does say that there is a deadline in mind and that the game definitely will ship. So whatever this game is, it won’t disappear off the face of the earth like Half-Life 2: Episode 3. However, Valve has not decided on specific dates for an announcement or a release, so while the game was initially projected to release in 2019, it could very well slip into 2020.

KitGuru Says: There are a bunch of Half-Life related VR code leaks floating around, so we can expect big things from Valve’s first full VR game. Unfortunately we don’t know when it will be coming out but at least one of the developers is confident that it definitely will ship.

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