Could Half Life 3 Actually Be In Development?

Like any news to do with Valve’s long gestating Half Life 3, Take this with more than a few grains of salt.

Half Life 3 just may be in development afterall. That being said however it seems as though the title may never see the light of day. While it may appear as though Valve  is sitting on a cash cow with HL3, from a business standpoint the notion of a full-fledged release of a game in the distant future (or at all) is getting slimmer and slimmer as time goes on.

An apparent inside source has stated that the game began it’s development cycle way back in 2009, but over time this team has dwindled as development on titles like Portal 2 and Left 4 dead 2 began. Valve’s flagship STEAM is the companies bread and butter now and the popular service is the core of what they do and the most probable reason we don’t see a whole lot of actual original games being released by the company.

From a business perspective this makes a lot of sense to invest resources into a service that is tried and true instead of investing that ca$h money into games that will obviously sell, but make a lot less than the established service already generates.

Another interesting point from this inside source is that the pressure to make Half Life 3 the greatest game of all time is beyond daunting. The company looked at how the popular Mass effect series was tarnished after its polarising ending in the third installment, an ending so divisive that Bioware actually changed it through later patches and DLC. This apparently led the company to reevaluate if it was worth taking the risk to make the game at all. Bioware made the mistake of ‘not pleasing’ fans and it may be Valve just don’t want that kind of backlash on the off chance the 3rd entry isn’t up to expectations.

The ever amusing lads from The Know Adam Kovic, Bruce Greene, and Lawrence Sonntag go into greater detail on the aforementioned points as to just why we will probably never see one of the most anticipated games of all time.