What Gamers Don’t Know About Valves’ 30-Plus HTC Vive Game Lineup

Valve has only created one game so far and this rather appears a good thing. At the outset, the approach of Valve Corporation to virtual reality or online gaming has been empirically as unstructured and laid back as the company seems to be.  

The company started with Half-Life, which is a first-person, sci-fi shooter game, winning over fifty awards: "Best Game Ever" and Game of the Year awards among others, as cited on Valve.

By next week, Valve will start to hurtle towards its first ever major hardware launch in the company's history with the HTC Vive VR headset, according to Polygon.

The company told Polygon on Monday that the final list of launch games was not ready yet. But later, Valve released a list of two dozen launch titles the next evening, stressing that more games will be definitely added as launch day approaches.

"There was never a 'launch title line up/portfolio' meeting. We have just been talking to developers throughout the process," Chet Faliszek of Valve said. "We first brought in a group of developers back in 2014 and pitched them on this idea of doing roomscale VR with tracked input."

"The loudest point: Don't fracture the development pipeline during the process, give us one system now and make sure that is the target for the consumer launch," he added. "So from day one, each developer kit we have shipped has had two base stations, two controllers, and a headset running at 90 Hz."

The several lessons that the company had in virtual-reality game development have not actually led to a number of Valve-made games for their headset nevertheless. But, at least, not just yet.

At the present, a collection of games and experiences in virtual reality, known as The Lab, appears as the only announced title. The Lab comes from individuals behind franchises such as Half-Life and Portal.

The Lab is scheduled for release this April, and it is for free. Jeep Barnett, Valve's programmer, whose student project later became Portal, told Polygon that The Lab was the product of numerous experimentation.

"We've explored all sorts of VR experiments over the years and, while many were failures, a few were strikingly compelling," Barnett said. "Among our favorites we had enough to form a broad intro to the possibilities of VR and decided to share these as The Lab." The Lab is designed for expansion.