Blizzard senior designer Michael Chu explained, "We love Terry. Terry's awesome. He came and visited us. We had a great time. But when we were looking for Doomfist, we were looking for something very specific given his role in the game and everything. When we were early in the audition process, we heard Sahr, who's the actor who plays Doomfist, and he just blew us away immediately. Once we heard his voice, it was like, 'Holy crap. That's Doomfist.'" Chu particularly praised the number of "flavors" Sahr is able to bring to the role, and Sahr's ability to, "...bring all these different aspects of the character to life.

While that doesn't rule out the possibility of Crews taking on another role in the future, it does explain why he might not have been the best fit for what Blizzard has planned with Doomfist.

Unlike public companies, Valve can afford to be cautious about VR's potential. In a clear jab at rival Oculus, he pooh-poohs overblown expectations of a mass market any time soon.

"Some people have got attention by going out and saying there'll be millions of [VR unit sales] and we're like, wow, I don't think so. I can't point to a single piece of content that would cause millions of people to justify changing their home computing.

"It's a great thing for enthusiasts and hardcore people. Where we are today is way further down the road than we were a year ago. But it's just going to be this slow, painful fits and starts kind of thing. So while we are really happy with how things are going, yeah, it doesn't match up with what other companies are saying."

The big obstacle is price. A Vive currently costs $800 and requires a high-end PC to work. Despite expectations of first-year price decreases, this does not presently look likely.

"If you took the existing VR systems and made them 80 percent cheaper, that's still not a huge market. There's still not a really incredibly compelling reason for people to spend 20 hours a day in VR.

Does Valve plan on doing anything with Source 2 in the coming years? If so, what?

We are continuing to use Source 2 as our primary game development environment. Aside from moving Dota 2 to the engine recently, we are are using it as the foundation of some unannounced products. We would like to have everyone working on games here at Valve to eventually be using the same engine. We also intend to continue to make the Source 2 engine work available to the broad developer community as we go, and to make it available free of charge.

The big thing right now is broadening the range of options we have in creating experiences. We think investing in hardware will give us those options. The knuckles controller is being designed at the same time as we’re designing our own VR games.

Much more narrowly, some of us are thinking about some of the AI work that is being hyped right now. Simplistically we have lots of data and compute capability that looks like the kinds of areas where machine learning should work well.

Personally I’m looking at research in brain-computer interfaces.

One example: Night Dive is developing a full remake of the original System Shock, going well beyond the basic rerelease that launched a couple months ago. Night Dive has acquired the full rights to the franchise, and Kick says he’s been working with Robert Waters, the game's original concept artist, to reimagine his designs from the early 1990s.

"Seeing the difference between his artistic abilities back then compared to now, and his ablity to reinterpret those ideas, it's just been really exciting for us," Kick says.

Part of the plan for this remake also includes a console version, which would be a first for Night Dive. Kuperman believes much of the company's future growth will come from creating console adaptations for more PC games, along with some ports for mobile devices.

We may even see a System Shock 3 someday, though Night Dive would need a larger publisher to take on the task. Kuperman says the company is "having some conversations" on this front. "To really do another game in that series is going to take resources and time and commitment that we don't have, and it's really not our core business," Kuperman says. (Until now, 2K Games’ Bioshock series has stood in as a spiritual successor.)

"You know, Microsoft has made a huge commitment trying sort of... I think normalize the Windows experience across multiple platforms. You see the elements of Windows 10 are going to appear in Xbox and Cortana and stuff like that. There is plenty of chance that Halo 5 could appear on the PC. Nothing to announce at this point... you know, we developed the game on an Intel platform. It wouldn’t be the hardest thing in the world to move it to PC and take advantage of PC stuff. But nothing I announce today on this chat."