Newell: If Valve has to "sell hardware, we will"

Valve boss Gabe Newell has said he'd have no reluctance in heading towards the hardware market, but it'd be best kept to those with more experience.

Speaking to Penny Arcade, Newell said said he's not scared of the hard stuff.

"Well, if we have to sell hardware we will," he said. "We have no reason to believe we’re any good at it, it’s more we think that we need to continue to have innovation and if the only way to get these kind of projects started is by us going and developing and selling the hardware directly then that’s what we’ll do."

He continued: "It’s definitely not the first thought that crosses our mind; we’d rather hardware people that are good at manufacturing and distributing hardware do that. We think it’s important enough that if that’s what we end up having to do then that’s what we end up having to do."

Valve has been in the news for more traditional reasons recently. On the subject of communicating with fans over the status of certain projects - Half-Life fans might want to look at this - Newell admitted it was "pretty frustrating" to see fans annoyed, but said it was a case of getting projects "a little more baked" before showing anything else.

"We’re acutely aware of how much we annoy our fans and it’s pretty frustrating to us when we put them into that situation. We try to go as fast as we can and we try to pick the things that we think are going to be most valuable to our customers and if there’s some magic way we can get more work done in a day then we’d love to hear about it."

He went on to say: "But we recognize that it’s been a long time whereas we have so many games that people really love–Counterstrike, Half-Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead, not a whole lot of Ricochet enthusiasts out there, and at the same time we want to be making sure that those games and those stories and those characters are moving forward while also making sure that we don’t just get into terminal sequelitis."

Hit the link to see more, including consoles opening up, tablets and Gabe's brand new, ultra amazing beard.