Half-Life 3 is one of the games that reached mythical proportions for gamers, due to the fact that fans of the series have waited years for news about the game and Valve has refused to say anything at all about the game. Now, Valve founder Gabe Newell has discussed the reasoning behind not focusing on pumping out new entries in the Half-Life series in a new interview by the Washington Post.

In the interview Newell revealed that the company could have stuck to create Half-Life games, but instead Valve decided to push the company forward by branching out into multiplayer games such as DOTA 2 and create Steam:

"I just think that we're more confident now and we've got that experience in lots of things. When we started out we were a single-player video game company that could have been really successful just doing Half-Life sequel after Half-Life sequel, but we collectively said let's try to make multi-player games even though there's never been a commercial successful multi-player game...Then we tried to do Steam. There were a bunch of people internally who thought Steam was a really bad idea, but what they didn't think was that they would tell the people who were working on Steam what to do with their time. They were like 'that's what you want to do wit your time, that's fine, but we're going to spend our time working on Half-Life 2. We think you're kind of wasting your time, but it's your time to waste.'"

This explains why Valve has chosen to focus on new projects rather than bringing much anticipated sequels such as Half-Life 3 to gamers, even though at this point if Half-Life 3 was confirmed or released it would be the biggest gaming story of the year.

Newell also explained how Valve has managed to continue to be successful in the video game industry even though many veteran companies have struggled to stay relevant:
"The company grew out of trying to think about how to design for the specific business challenges we would have. It's sort of a good news/bad news situation that our industry is changing so quickly. If you look at the requirements for just one piece, like art, from one generation of games to the next, it will change radically. You need people who are adaptable because the thing that makes you the best in the world in one generation of games is going to be totally useless in the next. So specialization in gaming is sort of the enemy of the future. We had to think about if we're going to be in a business that's changing that quickly, how do we avoid institutionalizing one set of production methods in such a way that we can't adapt to what's going to be coming next."