Valve’s Half-Life is one of the most popular first person shooter series in the business, and yet it’s been almost seven years since we’ve seen an actual numbered entry in the franchise and over three years since Half-Life 2: Episode Two hit store shelves. Could something be holding Valve back from working on the next game? Stardock's Brad Wardell seems to think so.

In an interview with IndustryGamers, Wardell talked about his own experiences working at Stardock and his company’s own digital gaming service, Impulse. While Stardock's Impulse service has been highly successful and generated a large stream of revenue for the company, it has also required a large portion of the company’s resources to keep running. Wardell suspects that Valve has fallen into a similar treadmill with its Steam service.

"If you were to look at a timeline of games developed in-house by Valve,” says Wardell, “and you look at before Steam and after Steam, it's definitely had an effect. I don't argue that that's a good thing or bad thing, but I do know the effect that's had on us, where I've had to put some of my top developers over the years onto Impulse to make sure it was getting better and better."

It seems entirely reasonable that Steam’s success has slowed down Valve’s work on the Half-Life franchise, but we’re sure that the company hasn’t entirely forgotten the series. Now that Portal 2 has almost released, hopefully we’ll hear something about the next Half-Life very soon.

[Full Disclosure: GameStop is the parent company of both Game Informer and Impulse.]