Valve currently has no plans for a wholesale redesign of its seven-year-old Source Engine, the developer has revealed.

President Gabe Newell told Develop that it intends to continually evolve the platform through regular updates and fixes rather than start again from scratch.

"There are a lot of advantages on iterating on a mature and stable and shipped codebase, as opposed to starting over again," explained Newell.

"I think, when you see a game like DOTA 2, you'll see how developers can get a lot more out of Source than most companies can get from a scratch-built engine.

"I think that incremental updates model has worked really well for us."

Newell also dismissed the prospect of going head to head with Epic's Unreal Engine in a licensing war.

"We're really happy if another studio wants to use our engine, but we're not going to go out there and try and muscle in on what Epic Games does," Newell said.

"A few people have used our engine, and I think a few more will find it useful now that we have a PS3 edition."

First introduced back in 2004, the Source Engine has been used on all major Valve titles released since, including its most recent effort, Portal 2.