Valve acquires Firewatch developers Campo Santo

Campo Santo announced on Saturday evening that it has been acquired by monolithic video game development and digital distribution outfit Valve.

The important news first: work on the team’s second title, In the Valley of Gods, will continue although it will now be a Valve game, and the announcement doesn’t mention whether the console versions are still forthcoming.

The Quarterly Review, Campo Santo’s quarterly journal, will also be continuing, although they will be moving from their office in San Francisco to Valve’s Bellevue, Seattle office.

In a statement signed from ‘Campo Santo’, the reasons for the acquisition are laid out. We’ve posted a couple of snippets below, but as you would expect from a company that publishes its own journal four times a year and focuses a lot on games with a heavy narrative edge, there’s a lot more detail on their actual announcement.

"We really like making video games. Furthermore, and perhaps more accurately, we really like making and producing entertainment. From the day-to-day production of our last game, Firewatch, to the way we run the company, make merchandise, meet players at expos and shows, send out a quarterly literary journal, throw open-to-the-public game demos in the middle of an artificial forest—all of it 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 (this, you may be surprised to learn, doesn’t happen every day). In us, they found a group with unique experience and valuable, diverse perspectives. It quickly became an obvious match."

"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."