Valve Announces Successor To Source engine

And...gives it away.

By Andrew Dodson on March 4, 2015 at 3:22am

At the Game Developer's Conference on March 3rd, Valve officially announced the successor to it's famous Source engine - the engine on which the famous "Half-Life 2" was developed. While there aren't a lot of details available yet on exactly what this new engine can do (there's not even a release date really), Valve did reveal one piece of information.

Source 2 will be available to developers at no cost.

"With Source 2, our focus is increasing creator productivity. Given how important user generated content is becoming, Source 2 is designed not for just the professional developer, but enabling gamers themselves to participate in the creation and development of their favorite games. We will be making Source 2 available for free to content developers. "
Jay Stelly, Senior Software Engineer at Valve

This is a fantastic week for developers, especially smaller studios, as this move echoes a similar move by Epic Games which also released the Unreal 4 engine this week to developers for free. Unity is also putting out their latest engine, Unity 5 (which released this week), for free, These announcements were mostly definitely a calculated by these major studios, as in the Source 2 press release, Valve went on to reference them:

This combined with recent announcements by Epic and Unity will help continue the PC's dominance as the premiere content authoring platform.
Jay Stelly, Senior Software Engineer at Valve

As mentioned, there is no other real news about abilities of Source 2, when we will see it or even what games are being made with it. Obviously, whispers of "Half-Life 3" echoed through everyone's mind as this new engine was announced, and while it seems likely, there has been no official news on the long-awaited sequel.