Valve on Valve Time: “We like it”

Q. How long does it take to ship Half-Life 3?

A. Valve Time.

It doesn’t even make sense, but then maths never made much sense to me anyway. In fact, I’m almost entirely convinced that maths is a big hoax invented by my grade 9 “maths” teacher to keep me from disrupting the class. I mean, numbers are just numbers. What do they really mean in the greater scheme of things? Nothing.

Obviously, the people at Valve are with me on this point, because – as every gamer knows – numbers aren’t important to Valve either. Especially numbers like dates.

“Valve Time is interesting,” Valve business development boss Jason Holtman told Eurogamer. “To my mind, an interesting thing about being on the inside of Valve and working there quite a while is, what we’re always concerned with is doing what’s right for the customer; doing what’s right for the product. And people get an idea of Valve Time because they’re very used to how maybe other people work and bring things out. Other people have much more formalised schedules. They have dates they have like lines in the sand because of their structures.”

That’s just not how things work at Valve HQ.

“When we get up to that, we may fully say at an E3 or a GDC, here’s a game coming out and here’s when we think it is. And then it doesn’t come out for a year. Or it doesn’t come out in the fall, it comes out in the spring. Hence we get tagged with Valve Time,”he explained.

“The reason for that is because it’s odd. It’s an oddity. In other cases what it means is people are usually slipping and it drives people nuts, because they’re so used to being able to predict when that comes out. In our minds we say, that’s not important. It’s actually not super important if this thing comes out on the Christmas where we said it would come out last year and we thought that’s when it was. What’s actually more important is we build it right and it comes out in spring.”

Or maybe the spring after that. Or maybe not ever. It’s like a game in itself.

“We like it. We also value it. If the end result is, we get tagged a little bit of like, we can’t tell when you’re coming out or you take longer, that’s okay with us,” Holtman said. “Because we’re trusting the fact that when it takes longer, it will be better. The thing that is ultimately consumed and played with, customers will like it better – like it better than the thing we could have shipped them a year ago.”

In related news, Half-Life 3 is confirmed for launch sometime, whenever, but you’ll like it more when it does.