In aninterview with Develop, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell further pushed the concept of handling “entertainment as a service,” saying that the company is “fully focused on asking how we can take advantage of being constantly and fully connected to our customers.”
“We went through the episodes phase, and now we’re going towards shorter and even shorter cycles.Team Fortress 2is the fastest frequency we work on with comparatively fast updates.” Continuing, he says “Left 4 Deadis starting to approach theTeam Fortress 2cycle.”
“Portal 2? We’ll have to see how much our customers want us to push in that direction. In general, our approach is to come into work and ask ‘what can we do for our customers today?'”
However, this focus on shorter development cycles does not signal the end of larger games at Valve: “I think you’ll still see projects from us that are huge in scale, simply because we have the ability to do that.”
Newell: We’ve moved beyond the episodic model[Develop]
