Yes, we’re still making In the Valley of Gods (as a Valve game!) yes, we’ll still support Firewatch and yes, we’ll still produce The Quarterly Review and our regular blog content. They asked us if we’d all be interested in coming up to Bellevue and doing that there and we said yes. Both sides spoke about our values and how, when you get right down to it, we, as human beings, are hard-limited by the time we have left when it comes to making the things we care about and believe in.
Third, and last, we had a series of long conversations with the people at Valve and everyone shared the satisfaction we take in working with people whose talents dwarf our own to make things we never thought possible. So in some sense, this is a return home for us.
Never ones to pass up free alcohol, we stole it and drank it to celebrate the launch of Firewatch a year later. It happened to be engraved on an unopened bottle of champagne. Second, while visiting IGN’s headquarters in early 2015 to talk about Firewatch, we came across an undelivered 2011 Game of the Year Award for Portal 2. In us, they found a group with unique experience and valuable, diverse perspectives. In Valve we found a group of folks who, to their core, feel the same way about the work that they do (this, you may be surprised to learn, doesn’t happen every day).
From the day-to-day production of our last game, Firewatch, to the way we run the company, make merchandise, meet players at expos and shows, send out a quarterly literary journal, throw open-to-the-public game demos in the middle of an artificial forest-all of it is geared towards surprising, delighting, and entertaining the customers who have shared in our success. Furthermore, and perhaps more accurately, we really like making and producing entertainment. First, we really like making video games. If you’re the type of person who gives two flips about this news, we can elaborate a little bit on this big decision. “Firewatch,” which has players take on the role of a lone fire lookout stationed in the Shoeshone National Forest, is also currently in development as an action film that is being financed by Good Universe. The group goes on to write that they found in Valve a company that shares their values and that the deal is an obvious match.Ĭampo Santo, which was formed in 2013 by Sean Vanaman, Jake Rodkin, Nels Anderson, and Olly Moss, will continue work on “In the Valley of Gods,” now as a Valve game, as well as continuing its support of “Firewatch” and producing its website “The Quarterly Review.” Besides developing “In the Valley of Gods,” Campo Santo is also working on porting “Firewatch” to the Nintendo Switch. “The twelve of us at Campo Santo have agreed to join Valve, where we will maintain our jobs as video game developers and continue production on our current project, ‘ In the Valley of Gods,'” according to the Saturday evening post. Valve Corporation, the company behind gaming store and platform Steam as well as franchises as diverse as “Portal,” “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive,” and “Half-Life,” is now also home to “ Firewatch” developer Campo Santo, according to a blog post on Campo Santo’s official site this weekend.