It’s hard to go long on the internet without running into a ‘Half-Life 3 confirmed’ joke, the eternal meme as we collectively wait for the third installment of Valve’s legendary FPS series to materialize. And speaking to the development team of Valve’s next game, Artifact, at their office in Seattle last week, Valve clearly hasn’t missed those jokes either.

“I think we're very aware of all the jokes because all of us lurk all the forums and share them around with each other,” says Jeep Barnett, a programmer on Artifact and a member of the original team that made Narbacular Drop, who were all hired to create Portal as a result.

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“Understanding Valve is very complicated because it's just made of all the people who work here,” Barnett explained. “From outside the company, or outside any company, you try to personify it as something very specific to understand what that thing is. It's just not that simple, so I think it's very hard to explain.”

“ A bunch of investment we've done over the past few years hasn't really been exceptionally visible to customers playing our games.

However Valve might work, they are clearly aware of the misconceptions and reputations around their company, even recently making a cheeky reference to the fact that they’ve never made a game with a ‘3’ in the title in a recent Dota 2 Gabe Newell announcer voice pack video.

For the years leading up to Artifact’s announcement in 2017, the perception has been that Valve doesn’t need to make games anymore, and may not even be interested. They can just sit on the money Steam is making through game sales and the Marketplace and coast as long as they want. Newell even jokingly addressed it back in March, saying “Hooray! Valve is going to start shipping games again.”

“A bunch of investment we've done over the past few years hasn't really been exceptionally visible to customers playing our games,” Artifact programmer Brandon Reinhart explained. “We spent a lot of time improving customer service on Steam. That was a hard problem, and it took a bunch of people a bunch of time to work on.”

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Put simply, there are a finite amount of people working at Valve, a company famous for not really having bosses and letting all its employees decide what they want to work on -- and people decided they wanted to work on things that aren’t a flashy new game for a while. Of course, they were also working on the Vive and Steam VR in that time, so it wasn’t all hidden.

“ We're in a place where we're able to as a company invest and focus a lot more on games again.

“Now we're in a place where we're able to, as a company, invest and focus a lot more on games again,” Reinhart said. “The answer to ‘you're just sitting on your butts, sitting on a pile of money, swimming around the gold vault,’ is to not actually do that. To deliver a bunch of high quality games that show we're actually working really hard.”

But making games takes time, and even though Valve hasn’t technically shipped a full game since Dota 2 in 2013 (excluding smaller VR titles and some overseas collaborations), Artifact has been in development since at least 2015. Reinhart says that now that some of the less visible stuff has passed, “over the next few years, you'll see us doing more things.”

Artifact First Screenshots and Art 21 IMAGES

Barnett said that, while they see and listen to all the feedback both their games and the company gets, they don’t usually respond directly. “The way that we communicate back is by making changes to the game and trying to ship features that address the things people are saying,” he explained. “Rather than just speaking and saying we're going to do this thing, we actually just go and do that thing.”

This attitude came through clear and genuine when I spoke to the people working at Valve. They know the reputation their studio has, but they prefer to just keep their heads down and work. They don’t seem to sweat the gossiping, rumors, and jokes about why they haven’t made games. Reinhart says “I think internally at Valve we feel that [perception] will work itself out as we continue to make really high quality products.”

I also spoke with Valve about Artifact’s real-money marketplace, and asked why they haven’t made any sort of revenue projections or goals for the game. You can find all of our Artifact coverage here, including a first look at gameplay in 4K and a break down of how to play.

Tom Marks is IGN's PC Editor and pie maker. You can follow him on Twitter