Valve picks up trademark for Half-Life 3

Gamers’ dreams may finally be coming true. Developer Valve has dropped hints that it is actually working on a new game in the Half-Life franchise. According to DualShockers , the company has apparently filed for a trademark for the Half-Life 3 name. The registration was made on September 29, and is currently said to be under examination.

Registering a trademark doesn’t necessarily mean that the company is working on a new game; it could just be trying to get the trademark in case squatters try to pick it up. However, earlier hints and rumours strongly point towards this putting the company a step closer to an official announcement for the game.

The fate of Gordon and Alyx is still unknown

We’ve known for quite some time now that Valve has opened up an entry for Half-Life 3 on its bug-tracking website, but now, reports are pointing to a new one, going by the name Half-Life 3 Core. The new one was spotted by a NeoGAF user who goes by the name Ekim. Shortly after being discovered, however, Valve seems to have made the Half-Life 3 Core page unavailable.

According to the tracking website, there seem to be 46 developers working on Half-Life 3 right now. Among these developers are debuggers and QA testers.

Earlier, evidence of Half-Life 3 being in development had been discovered from a mailing list that was found in project management and bug tracking software Jira. Valve apparently had to react to an issue with Jira, which then left a short window where the company’s internal tickets were publicly accessible. Shortly after this, the company shut down the access to its Jira database.

There were many listings in the database, with names like Stars of Blood, Return to Ravenholm, Episode 3/Episode 3 Movie, Hardware/Hardware Core, SteamMMO/SteamMMO Core and F-Stop. There were also some joke groups in the database which had names like WUBWUBWUB…, yo dawg and gayben, among others.