Valve just announced at the 2015 Game Developer’s Conference that yes, the new version of their venerable Source engine is under development. Source 2 has been an open secret for some time now, since 2013 when leaked content from Valve’s project tracker made references to it. However since Valve has not released a game since Dota 2 in July 2013, the news about future development on the source platform had died down, with many suspecting that Valve had switched full force to working on their Steam platform. This seems now to not be the case.
In their announcement at GDC 2015, Valve stated that “We will be making Source 2 available for free to content developers. This combined with recent announcements by Epic and Unity will help continue the PCs dominance as the premiere content authoring platform.” It’s interesting that Valve mentions Epic and Unity in this announcement, as while Valve did license the original Source platform out to third party developers it was not considered by and large to be a ‘commercial’ engine such as Epic’s Unreal Engine or Unity. If Valve does move forward in marketing Source 2 as a licensed engine, it will be interesting to see what their monetization strategy is exactly.
The original source engine was used in most of Valve’s first party releases, including Half Life 2, CS:GO, and the Left 4 Dead series. Source 2 itself was also a frequent subject in the rumors relating to a possible, “Half Life 3”, however Valve has not confirmed any new Half Life releases following the release of Half Life 2: Episode 2 in 2007.
