At the opening ceremony of Valve’s DOTA 2 tournament, Valve head Gabe Newell explained that he’s been focusing much of his attention on the company’s VR initiatives.

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See Also: Inside the ‘DOTA 2 VR Hub’

While VR’s potential is undeniably huge, it’s still a small, if growing, market compared to the overall gaming industry, which makes up Valve’s core business of game distribution through their Steam platform. But that doesn’t mean the company isn’t making VR a priority; as pointed out by GeekWire, Valve’s head honcho, Gabe Newell, explained on stage at the opening ceremony of ‘The International 2016’, the company’s DOTA 2 tournament:

“For the last year I’ve been spending most of my time with the VR team,” he said. “We have a bunch of VR systems set up above the Secret Shop [a location in the venue], so if you have a chance, go check it out and let me know at gaben@valvesoftware.com what you think.”

Newell’s mention of attention on the company’s VR efforts presumably refers to the DOTA 2 VR Hub—which allows players to watch live matches and hear commentary in VR with friends—that Valve launched in advance of The International 2016. Yet one can imagine that the company has been working on much more that has yet been revealed.

Valve is of course also responsible for developing the Vive VR headset and Lighthouse tracking system, and partnered with HTC to build it. The company has also focused heavily on making Steam a leading source of VR game and software distribution.

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See Also: Valve’s Only VR Title, ‘The Lab’, is the Highest Rated Game on All of Steam

We noted recently that Valve’s The Lab has soared to be Steam’s top reviewed game, among more than 9,000 other titles. The company confirmed to us that they had no plans to stop there.

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“We are certainly continuing our work to expand Steam VR for developers and aspiring content creators, and working on our VR content,” Doug Lombardi, Valve’s VP of Marketing, told Road to VR.

With the polished lathered upon The Lab, and it’s success as one of the best introductory VR experiences—not to mention a history of some of gaming’s most beloved hits—it seems Valve very well could be attempting to brew the ‘killer app’ that the consumer VR gaming space is still seeking.

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • yag

    HL3 VR confirmed.

    • Gus Bisbal

      I wish…holy mother of I wish that was true. Let me explain why it is unlikely to happen. Valve is more a software development company in its true sense they develop ideas that sometimes turn into products. They are not a products company. Their Teams get money and asked go do something cool. Say $3mil. If one team needs more money they pitch THE OTHER TEAMS, and if they join they now have $6mil (as an example) they then begin to all band together, organically if they project looks awesome. That is how Half life got born in the first place and all the eye tracking stuff they did for Characters in the game. HL3 would require the same kind of thing and it may be not interesting enough to get everyone on board to make it happen. They don’t care about capturing a market, they don’t care about equity in the HL Brand, its all about doing cool shit because they just make money on steam.

      • Eric Pipedream Leisy

        I believe this same reasoning why the development of HL3 is really in doubt.

      • yag

        Agree… AAA games is not the most interesting business for them…

  • DiGiCT Ltd

    Agree, Valve does a lot for us developers.
    The lab is for sure an good example to see what potential VR has.
    IMHO it is the best VR to play, bought several other ones and also got all the preorder titles that came with vive, still the lab shows something that impress me more.
    Into the Blue is also impressive but its not a game rather an expierence.
    Cant say there are much good games currently out for VR.
    In my experience there are 2 issues developers face.

    1. You really need to think about the game from scratch and cant just port a certain game concept over as some do, they most fail.

    2. The way to make a game in VR is totally different in workflow, especially on design.
    Everything need to be tweaked and squeezed to get the 90 FPS performance.

    It is hard for many developers as you need to start learning almost all again from scratch.

    Valve’s lab is actually a working lab demo as it says, showing how it can be but not a finished game at all.
    Next to that they released the Lab renderer unity package for devs to show how performance can be won by changing shader logic.

    Hope to see more coming from them as for sure i would go for a valve title as soon as they would release one, I think it would be an awesome VR experience

    Dota VR hub is really awesome, finally can see how you look like with all those ingame cosmetics you bought and unlocked.
    The ingame spectator mode really hits the top, for me there is no better way as in VR to spectate a game like Dota ;-)

    Thank you Valve !.

  • Get Schwifty!

    Good article to show commitment by Valve, but the last paragraph is a bit over the top don’t you think – “attempting to brew the “killer app” that the consumer VR gaming space is still seeking”? I think we all agree that a AAA VR title is needed… but the technology speaks for itself, developers and consumers have been handed a new media to explore and now it’s up to development to bring forth titles that are truly decent games and not just glorified technology demos.