Valve acquires Firewatch developer Campo Santo
"It quickly became an obvious match".
Firewatch developer Campo Santo has announced that it has "agreed to join Valve", where it will "maintain our jobs as video game developers and continue production on" its Ancient Egyptian adventure In the Valley of the Gods.
The announcement was made over the weekend in a blog post on Campo Santo's website, in which the developer explained its reasoning for agreeing to the acquisition. "First", it said, "we really like making video games. Furthermore, and perhaps more accurately, we really like making and producing entertainment."
According to the developer, everything it does, "is geared towards surprising, delighting, and entertaining the customers who have shared in our success".
"In Valve we found a group of folks who, to their core, feel the same way about the work that they do," the post continued, "In us, they found a group with unique experience and valuable, diverse perspectives. It quickly became an obvious match."
During "a series of long conversations", Campo Santo says, "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. They asked us if we'd all be interested in coming up to Bellevue and doing that there and we said yes."
Camp Santo's acquisition comes just a month after Gabe Newell told press that Valve was "going to start shipping games again". Prior to that announcement, Newell had revealed that the company is working on three new VR games and a fully-fledged single-player title, alongside the upcoming DOTA 2-themed card game Artifact.
Valve will also now publish Campo Santo's In the Valley of the Gods, which sees players exploring a remote ancient valley in the Egyptian desert, "uncovering treasure and treachery in pursuit of a discovery that could bring you fame and fortune-or leave you for dead, buried beneath the sands". The game is currently expected to arrive on PC and consoles in 2019, while a Switch version of Campo Santo's Firewatch will launch later this year.
