I only gave myself a one percent chance of being correct when I suggested that Valve might bolster its Valve Index VR headset announcement (and its chances of becoming one of the best VR headsets) by also announcing the Half-Life VR game that's been rumored for a while, and I'm thankful for the 99 percent leeway I gave myself.
Instead of announcing one of the three "big" VR games we know Valve is working on, it highlighted some other, non-Valve games, and merely teased a "flagship VR game" coming later this year for SteamVR-compatible headsets (The Index and the HTC Vive, mainly).
I was making sense yesterday, right? I mean, if you're trying to sell a VR kit that costs a grand, of course you bundle an exciting game with it to get those pre-orders rolling.
Unless you're Valve.
At least I was right about one thing: "Predicting what Valve is and isn't going to do is a losing game, even with reliable information."
As for whether or not a Half-Life VR game exists at all, I think the evidence (which I run down in yesterday's article) is pretty compelling, but we'll have to wait a little longer to find out what this "flagship" game is. The word does imply it comes from one of Valve's most beloved series—a "flagship" Microsoft game is a Halo game, for instance.
But who the hell knows? It's Valve.
Along with the Index announcement, Valve included screenshots of a controller tech demo called Aperture Hand Labs, so at least we know it's still messing around in the universe. Here's what that looks like:
