Valve to create new games, says co-founder Gabe Newell

Newell also says that PUBG is the third most successful game ever on Steam

Video games publisher Valve Software has announced it will be releasing its own games again after a five-year pause.

Co-founder of Valve, Gabe Newell, announced that the company will start releasing its own games once again having spent recent years focusing on the Steam gaming platform and marketplace and hardware like the Vive headset, during a press interview at Valve's studio in Bellevue, Washington, USA.

During the interview, Newell said that the Steam platform had laid the foundations for the future and expressed his envy of Japanese game developer, Nintendo, according to PC Gamer.

"We've always been a little bit jealous of companies like Nintendo," he said. "When Miyamoto is sitting down thinking about the next version of Zelda or Mario he's thinking what is the controller going to look like, what sort of graphics and other capabilities, and he can introduce new capabilities like motion input because he controls both of those things."

The news has sparked excitement among games enthusiasts that Valve will be making sequels to some of its most successful games such as Half-Life, Portal, Team Fortress and Counter Strike.

Newell also stated that Player Unknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) is now the third bestselling game ever on the Steam market, something he put down to Valve's work on Steam. The Battle Royale game parachutes the player onto an island, where they must find loot and fight it out to be the last player standing.

PUBG's popularity is partly down to its clever marketing, its makers publicising the game by giving it out to YouTubers and streamers on Twitch. Rather than major spending on flashy advertising, PUBG's popularity grew largely through word of mouth.

While PUBG runs on Steam it is not a Valve game. The last Valve game was back in 2013, with Dota-2. That game sets two teams of five players against each other. Each team has a base with a central structure (called an "Ancient") with the first team to destroy the other team's Ancient winning the game.