Valve boss Gabe Newell has been hanging out in New Zealand for the past year or so after deciding to extend his 10-day vacation in March 2020 as an indefinite retreat from the COVID-19 pandemic. (The nice thing about being a billionaire is that you can do that sort of thing as soon as you think of it.) The longer he stays, the more he seems to like the place: in October 2020, he pondered the possibility of relocating game developers (possibly including some from Valve) to this country.

In a new interview with 1 News, Newell again said that there is "strong interest" among some Valve employees in relocating.

"You don't want to uproot a bunch of families and have them come here and things get all better and then you have to turn around and go back. That's why it's important to better understand how long this epidemic will affect our operational decisions."

Others that could be moved to New Zealand are major esports tournaments, including The International and CS:GO Majors, Newell said. Last year's International and Rio Major were postponed due to the pandemic. However, holding the event in New Zealand, where the pandemic is under control, is a "realistic possibility."

"If I literally had to guess when an in-person tournament could be safely held somewhere else in the world [in another country], it would be very difficult for me to say. Hopefully, we might be able to do such a quarantine." [As long as Covid continues to mutate, the likelihood of an outbreak of infectious disease in this country is increasing.

Newell also touched on the topic of Half-Life 3 (or, more accurately, the topic of why he refuses to talk about the subject of Half-Life 3) and "Citadel," the apparent code name for something that may or may not be in production at Valve. While refusing to actually talk about either, he did confirm that Valve has a new project in the works and, perhaps more importantly, that the success of Half-Life has rekindled his enthusiasm for game development: alix

"There is definitely an announcement There are games in development that we plan to do. It's fun to ship games. Alyx was fantastic. Getting back into single player games has given us a lot of momentum within the company to do more.

He then focused on the topic of Cyberpunk 2077, saying he had "a lot of fun" playing the PC version and that he "sympathizes with the situation that all game developers fall into."

"All I know is that there are a lot of very happy gamers in the PC space. There are great aspects to this game that show tremendous effort." It's unfair to throw stones at other developers. It's pretty amazing just to bring something that complex and ambitious to the world. The PC version I played was a lot of fun, and I'm sure it's going to be a great success.