During this week’sState of Play, a game that looked an awful lot likeHalf-Life: Alyxgot shown off. It wasn’t Half-Life: Alyx — it was a new VR game from Deep Silver,Metro Awakening. Like Half-Life: Alyx, it’s a big, triple-A, story-focused VR FPS set in a post-apocalyptic world that’s a prequel to an iconic FPS series. I didn’t actually mistake this game for Half-Life: Alyx —Valve’sVRprequel is burned into my brain — but it immediately got me thinking: why isn’t Alyx available anywhere other than Steam yet?
The answer to this question might seem simplistic at first. Valve, likeNintendo,Sony, andMicrosoft, is a platform holder as much as it is a developer. Nintendo doesn’t just want to sell games, it wants to sell consoles for you to play those games on, controllers to play them with, chargers to keep your console running, and peripherals to enhance the experience. Valve, similarly, wants you to stay in its ecosystem. It wants you to use Steam to play your games and use Steam to buy more games. And it manufactures hardware, like theSteam Deckand theIndex, that you may use to play those games, which it also sells.
The thing is, though,Steamdoesn’t really operate that way in practice. The Steam Deck, for example, can play games fromEpic Games StoreandXbox Game Passwith a bit of tinkering. It isn’t exclusively for playing Valve games. It’s a portable gaming PC, with most of the functionality that entails. The launch of Half-Life: Alyx was defined by a similarly ecumenical approach. You could play it with an Index — which Valve shipped me and other reviewers during the pre-release period so that we could have optimal experiences — but you could also use anOculus Riftor a Vive, even an Oculus Quest if you had a Link cable. If you had a PC headset, it would probably work.
Given this all-are-welcome approach, it seemed natural that Valve would eventually port Half-Life: Alyx to PlayStation’s ecosystem. The time might not have been right for the first few years after Alyx’s release, given that Sony users were still using thePSVRheadset that originated for the PS4. But, it’s been nearly a year since the launch of PSVR2 and over a year since it was announced in November of 2022. If Valve was interested in bringing the game over, its developers would have had their hands on dev kits long before that. With every State of Play that passes without the announcement that Half-Life: Alyx is coming to PS5, I’m increasingly wondering, what’s the deal?
Though Valve skipped the PS4 generation, that had more to do with the company largely taking a break from single-player game development than any lapse in its relationship with Sony. It brought Half-Life and Half-Life 2 to the PS2 and PS3 respectively. Portal and Portal 2 were also available on PS3, and several other Valve games came to the console through The Orange Box collection.
Maybe Valve moving into the hardware game has prevented it from expanding onto other companies’ platforms? The work required to sell and maintain hardware may be eating up the bandwidth that otherwise could have been used to port its games to other consoles. But it seems like a lot of money to leave on the table. Half-Life: Alyx launching on PSVR2 would be a win-win for Valve and Sony.
It would require a comparatively small team to get the game running on the new hardware, and Alyx (which convinced a not insignificant amount of people to purchase thousand dollar headsets) would instantly be a killer app for PSVR2. It would be the biggest possible third-party game Sony could get on PSVR2, so I can’t believe that Sony hasn’t offered to back up a dump truck of money to Valve’s Bellevue offices for a port. Maybe that’s the problem. As a platform holder, Valve has more money than it could ever need, with Steam generating billions of dollars in revenue every year. What seems like a no-brainer to me (someone with no billions) may seem like a hassle to Valve (a company with several billions).
