Erik Wolpaw talks about the possibility of Portal 3: Valve is smaller than you think

In the world of video games, Valve is a unique company that had its heyday around the years 2000-2010 despite an influence that is still as important in the video game world, whether through the Steam platform or games such as Counter Strike or Dota 2. Today, it is the Portal license that is talking about it again, or rather its co-screenwriter, Erik Wolpaw, who evokes Portal 3.

Wolpaw joked about Portal 3 despite wanting a sequel

Last year, the co-screenwriter of the Portal saga, Erik Wolpaw, had already expressed his wish to see the Portal franchise reborn from its ashes in the podcast Kiwi Talkz and he had spoken of Valve without filter:

“We need to start Portal 3. That’s my message to…everyone. I’m not getting any younger.

The problem is that Valve has 300 employees and I don’t know the exact split – how many of them are on the production side versus the business side of Steam versus the legal side versus whatever .

So there are a lot of opportunity costs in taking 75 people and trying to make a game. the world is working.”

It was in the latest episode of Simon Parkin’s My Perfect Console podcast that Erik Wolpaw once again asked about these statements and a possible sequel to the Portal license.

“It’s a joke. But the real reason is that in a flat structure like Valve, there is an opportunity cost to do anything. And everything that happens at Valve right now requires dedication and participation. people who work there, and it’s voluntary.

So to some degree I’d love to do a Portal 3, but I understand that – besides the fact that I’m mostly kidding when I say this, just to give Valve and the people I work with a hard time – is it really going out and advocating for something like that, it could be destructive, just in the sense that you don’t want to cause internal conflict?

I think that’s what I do, but I think people who might be bothered by this understand that it’s just a joke on my part.”

Erik Wolpaw therefore wanted to speak honestly and recall that these statements were personal and should not interfere with Valve’s internal organization or the work of studio employees. Wolpaw is not oblivious, he knows the sector as well as the company, and he also talks about the size of the latter and the distorted perception that the public could have of it.

“The thing is, Valve isn’t a giant company. People sometimes think that’s because of Steam’s outsized influence, but in reality, there aren’t that many of them.

It takes manpower to keep Dota alive, it takes manpower to keep CS:GO alive, and the free nature of Valve means there are a lot of experiments that simply fail. . So things are happening. If you were inside Valve, you’d think there’s always something going on, because there is.

And while I appreciate the things I worked on at Valve, and the time I spent there, and that’s important to me, if I had to choose between games from Valve and Steam – which is , in my opinion, the most democratizing technology to allow people to create games and present them to people – I think I would choose Steam.

Take everything I say with a grain of salt, because like anyone steeped in a system, I don’t see the big picture, my point of view is very subjective. I think the problem that people always think it is – and I’ve done it myself, more as a joke than anything else – is a money problem, but it’s not a money is a labor issue.

You have to choose what you’re going to work on, and time is limited.”

As innovative and important as it is in the history of video games and in the democratization of this medium, Valve is a small studio in proportion to its influence. On the other hand, Wolpaw wished to conclude on a lighter note by explaining that the pace at which Valve was releasing games in the mid and late 2000s may also have influenced the public’s belief that the company had slowed down somewhat. These days.

“We had a good time. If you look between when I started in 2004 and when Portal 2 came out in 2011, Valve released an amazing number of games during that time – Half-Life 2 Episode 1, Episode 2, Portal, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, and Portal 2, plus updates to many of these games and DLCs It was a very busy time.

Maybe we should have spread that over ten more years, we would have felt like we were doing more!”

Despite the fact that it is very unlikely that a sequel to the Portal saga will see the light of day, we can be sure that Valve continues to work hard whether it is to evolve Steam or to evolve its games like us. we could see it with the announcement of the launch of Counter Stirke 2 for this summer.