Gabe Newell, Valve’s founder recently said that the company is back in the business of “making and shipping games.” The last title that Valve has developed was 2013’s Dota 2, and now, Valve has announced that their next game will be called Artifact, which has a tentative release date sometime this year. 

Artifact will be a digital card game that is somewhat similar to the popular Hearthstone franchise. The game will be based on the universe of Dota 2, and will also follow the rules of that game. Initially announced last year at the International Dota 2 Championships , Artifact was met with neutral response from the gaming community. It will be developed in partnership with Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic the Gathering. 

Furthermore Newell said to PC Gamer that Artifact will be “the first of several games” that will be developed by the studio. In addition, he also talked about why Valve moved away from developing games and Newell expressed his concerns that PCs are becoming a closed system. 

“We’ve always been a little bit jealous of companies like Nintendo,” Newell said. “When Miyamoto is sitting down and thinking about the next version of Zelda or Mario, he’s thinking what is the controller going to look like, what sort of graphics and other capabilities. He can introduce new capabilities like motion input because he controls both of those things. And he can make the hardware look as good as possible because he’s designing the software at the same time that’s really going to take advantage of it. So that is something we’ve been jealous of, and that’s something that you’ll see us taking advantage of subsequently.”

When asked to give a few details regarding Valve’s future games, Newell did not give any information. However, last January, he said in a Reddit AMA that the company is currently working on a single-player game. Furthermore, there were also talks of developing three more VR games. Whatever those games may be, at least we know for a fact that Valve is back in the business. 

Which game do you think Valve should work on next? Share your thoughts in the comments below.