These days, Valve is best known for digital game distribution service Steam and its hardware efforts. But the company behind the Half-Life, Counter-Strike, and Portal series hasn't abandoned its game development roots. Gabe Newell's firm has just acquired Campo Santo---the independent studio behind the critically acclaimed Firewatch.
Campo Santo confirmed that its 12-person team will relocate to Valve's headquarters in Seattle and that it will continue work on 'In the Valley of the Gods.' Featuring the same first-person perspective and visual style as Firewatch, the upcoming game is set in the Egyptian desert during the 1920s.
"In Valve we found a group of folks who, to their core, feel the same way about the work that they do (this, you may be surprised to learn, doesn't happen every day)," wrote Campo Santo. "In us, they found a group with unique experience and valuable, diverse perspectives. It quickly became an obvious match."
While Valve continues to release updates for its current crop of games, new titles have been sparse; the last 'full' game it released, ignoring the free, VR minigame collection The Lab, was Dota 2 in 2013. It did announce Artifact, a Hearthstone-like digital trading card game based on Dota 2 last year, but that came as a disappointed to a lot of Valve fans who were hoping for more. The company is also working on three new virtual reality games, though we haven't heard much about these for quite a while. Let's hope that the Campo Santo deal results in some new titles of the quality that made Valve an industry leader, though Half-Life 3 might be a bit optimistic.