Valve: "We've always been a little jealous of Nintendo"

Valve last week lifted the lid on Artifact and gave us a closer look at the card game, with the company looking to step up their efforts and produce more titles alongside their work in the hardware space.

To that end, in a recent interview with the American branch of PC Gamer, Valve head honcho Gabe Newell admitted to being happy about the shifting of gears and said that the company has always been a bit jealous of Nintendo because of that company's ability to design software and hardware at the same time.

"We aren't going to be talking about it today, but sort of the big thing, the new arrow we have in our quiver, really, is our ability to develop hardware and software simultaneously. We've always been a little bit jealous of companies like Nintendo," Newell said.

"When Shigeru Miyamoto is sitting down and 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. He can introduce new capabilities like motion input because he controls both of those things. And he can make the hardware look as good as possible because he's designing the software at the same time that's really going to take advantage of it. So that is something we've been jealous of, and that's something that you'll see us taking advantage of subsequently."

Valve's next game, Artifact, is a free-to-play digital card game for the PC and it will release later this year.