Valve veteran imperiously scorns reports that it's secretly finished Half-Life 3 and moving devs to other projects: 'They've been done for months! They just sit on the game! They're just relaxing!'

It's not like the Half-Life 3 rumour mill ever went away, but over the past few years the tinfoil hats have been a-twitching more than ever. If it's not one thing, it's another: the anniversary of Half-Life 2, the latest mention of "HLX" (speculated to be an internal codename) in the Steam backend or, my personal favourite, a spike in pizza deliveries near Valve's offices.

People will glom onto anything and everything that seems to be even tangentially related to Half-Life 3, and the latest rumour doing the rounds was no exception. The Valve fan account GabeFollower posted a new YouTube video claiming that this time it was actually, definitely happening, including a claim that the project is so done-and-dusted that Valve had begun moving its devs onto other projects. So far, so Sunday morning, though for whatever reason this claim was picked up and reported on by several outlets.

Now: any games developer reading the above is probably laughing themselves silly. This is an over-simplification but games have so many moving parts that the final stages of development are where the whole project starts coming together. It's the most intense period of development and, yes, this is why the industry and developers have a perennial problem with crunch, which is almost always linked to getting a game out the door.

One person who definitely had a chuckle at the claim, or perhaps an agonised bark, is Valve veteran and former writer Chet Faliszek, who left the company in 2017 and whose credits include the Half-Life 2 episodes, Portal, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

In Faliszek's own YouTube video he shows an example of the coverage, before launching into a magnificently insincere monologue about why the claim must be correct.

"Some really good facts from a couple guys we know well, who know insiders at Valve, they know how it's going," says Faliszek. "They must be right! Because I cannot think of a time a product has shipped where, at the end of the project, it's not just relaxation right? It's hanging out by the lake, maybe going home early and hanging out with your family, relaxing… golf games."

Faliszek then goes on to list all the things that definitely do not happen at the end of a game's development.

"There's never crunch towards the end of a project, there's never a rush, there's never a scramble to try to fix all the bugs or get all the content in, or playtest to make sure there's nothing broken or missing. I have never heard of a game shipping where they scrambled and then had to release a day zero patch or even a day one patch to fix any of the bugs…

"Because they've been done for months! They just sit on the game! They're just relaxing, that's entirely how games are made. In case you didn't know, I just wanted to let you know. Because maybe you didn't know that, games development is the most relaxing thing. Crunch is a myth, crunch really is just when people want to get away from their families and hang out and play pool."

Faliszek's tongue is so far in his cheek here that he must feel like a squirrel transporting nuts, because it's such a self-evidently absurd claim, and the frustration comes through loud and clear. To be clear: Valve is not especially known for crunch, but I have absolutely no doubt that at times Valve staff have and will continue to make extraordinary demands of themselves. That's probably why they're at Valve in the first place.

As for Half-Life 3, the latest fan frenzy was over a supposed Game Awards reveal which, spoiler alert, didn't happen. Also: did you know that the game was actually going to be revealed 12 years ago as a PC Gamer cover exclusive? No, neither did we.

Gabe Newell himself addressed Half-Life 2: Episode 3 in the Half-Life 2 20th anniversary documentary, saying that the project wasn't moving anything forward and "that's copping out of your obligation to gamers… we could've shipped it, it wouldn't have been that hard. The failure, my personal failure was being stumped. I couldn't figure out why doing Episode 3 was pushing anything forward."