Valve co-founder Gabe Newell has said that the legendary developer-turned-retailer "is going to start shipping games again".

Artifact First Screenshots and Art 21 IMAGES

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Speaking at the press presentation for Valve's latest, Artifact , Newell said: "Artifact is the first of several games that are going to be coming from us, so that’s sort of good news. Hurray! Valve is going to start shipping games again."Valve made its name with a series of classic games, including Half-Life, Portal and Counter-Strike, but has been much quieter on the development front in recent years, focusing more on its Steam platform and hardware creation.It sounds as though Valve's work with hardware will be a part of its future games, however:"We aren’t going to be talking about it today," continued Newell, "but sort of the big thing that, the new arrow we have in our quiver really is the ability to develop hardware and software simultaneously."Newell compared the approach to that of Nintendo, who often work to match their hardware and software:"We’ve always been a little bit jealous of companies like Nintendo. 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."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 that. That’s something we’ve been jealous of and that’s something that you’ll see us taking advantage of subsequently."For now, we have Artifact, Valve's Dota-themed digital card game , which we played for the first time yesterday. You can check out the first screenshots in the gallery above, find out all the new details (including how the game isn't free-to-play), and see the three new characters it's teasing for Dota 2

Joe Skrebels is IGN's UK News Editor, and he wants a Full Life Consequences game. Follow him on Twitter