Gabe Newell: Valve will sell hardware “if it has to”

Valve has found a pretty massive amount of success in the software space of the gaming industry, but what if they were dive into the hardware side of it?

Valve’s Gabe Newell, speaking in an interview with Penny Arcade, said that the company is certainly open to the idea of jumping into making hardware if the company feels like it “has to”.

“Well, if we have to sell hardware we will,” he said. “We have no reason to believe we’re any good at it, it’s more we think that we need to continue to have innovation and if the only way to get these kind of projects started is by us going and developing and selling the hardware directly then that’s what we’ll do.”

Newell continued: “It’s definitely not the first thought that crosses our mind; we’d rather hardware people that are good at manufacturing and distributing hardware do that. We think it’s important enough that if that’s what we end up having to do then that’s what we end up having to do.”

Newell also touched on the sensitive topic of Half-Life 2 Episode 3 topic, acknowledging that fans were disappointed in the lack of Half-Life-related news over the past several years, be it Episode 3 or even Half-Life 3.

“We’re acutely aware of how much we annoy our fans and it’s pretty frustrating to us when we put them into that situation. We try to go as fast as we can and we try to pick the things that we think are going to be most valuable to our customers and if there’s some magic way we can get more work done in a day then we’d love to hear about it, but we recognize that it’s been a long time whereas we have so many games that people really love–Counterstrike, Half Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead, not a whole lot of Ricochet enthusiasts out there, and at the same time we want to be making sure that those games and those stories and those characters are moving forward while also making sure that we don’t just get into terminal sequelitis.”

You can hear more from Newell by checking out the full interview here.