If you haven’t heard already, there have been a surprising amount of Half-Life 3 rumblings going on since yesterday. Rumblings that are interestingly timed with lots of other Valve news, I might add.
Late yesterday afternoon, a user on the bastion of knowledge and flamewars known as NeoGAF discovered that Valve had gone ahead and registered Half-Life 3 as a trademark in Europe sometime in the past few days. What??
Now, as promising as that sounds at first, it’s no guarantee. Valve could be simply looking to protect its brand, or plan very, very far ahead. Or who knows what. But it’s still exciting.
Additionally, there was a leaked shot from Valve itself, taken from their internal JIRA database. JIRA is a “proprietary issue tracking product,” according to the book of knowledge known as Wikipedia, and the leak appears to show an entry for Half-Life 3 in JIRA. Issue tracking? Half-Life 3? Again, it’s very possible that they just have that entry for the eventual development of the game. It could even be a company joke. But still, taken at face value, these signs are pretty compelling if you’re a wishful thinker.
Personally, I think it’s a planned leak on Valve’s part. Imagine if Valve announces Half-Life 3, and that it runs exclusively on Steam OS? They’d never actually do that, but even if it ran on all Steam platforms but was “best experienced on SteamOS,” or something, it’d do wonders in getting people flocking to the platform. Not only that, but it would jump-start other triple-A developers getting their big titles on SteamOS, and help it avoid being yet another primarily indie games-haven. Not that I don’t love indie stores – but there’s certainly no shortage of them these days.
Whatever Valve decides to do, it’s probably impossible for Half-Life 3 to not make an enormous, unsubtle splash whenever we do finally get concrete information.
