Portal DLC rumours fly as McLain visits Valve

Valve may be coming good on the promise to build all its products under the ‘games as a service’ credo, with new claims suggesting that further Portal work is underway at the Bellevue studio.

The husband of Glados actress Ellen McLain has said on Twitter that his wife has returned to Valve’s studio for “more Portal work”.

McLain’s husband, John Lowrie, also said his wife is scheduled to see Valve on Tuesday “for a new game”.

The classically trained opera singer lends voice support in several Valve games.

But the claim that Valve is pursuing ”more Portal work” may not relate to game projects.

Valve is growing as a digital entertainment company that experiments with animations, comics and various merchandise.

If Valve was building a completely new Portal game, it is highly unlikely that McLain’s voice acting would be needed at this early stage.

Portal 2 went gold in March this year, and was released in April.

More likely, if McLain is working on a Portal games project, that the studio is building new DLC.

Earlier in the year, Valve president Gabe Newell revealed to Develop that the studio had shifted away from the episodic development model and more into ‘games as a service’ – where games become platforms for continuous updates.

“If you look at Team Fortress 2, that’s what we now think is the best model for what we’ve been doing,” Newell said.

“Our updates and release model on that keeps on getting shorter and shorter. We went through the episodes phase, and now we’re going towards shorter and even shorter cycles.

“Left 4 Dead is starting to approach the Team Fortress 2 cycle.

“Portal 2? We’ll have to see how much our customers want us to push in that direction,” he said.

“In general, our approach is to come into work and ask ‘what can we do for our customers today’?”