Gabe Newell is back from New Zealand. After spending the pandemic on the South Pacific island that was mercifully spared the vast death tolls of COVID-19, Newell has returned for an interview with IGN on the upcoming Steam Deck.

Although most of the 30-minute interview talked about the Deck's design and performance, Newell did get to talk about how Valve is doing in these not-quite-post-COVID times.

"I think we all got better at working remotely. I was working just a little more remote than most other people," Newell joked before launching into how hard it was for Valve at large to switch to working from home.

"I think if you looked at sort of course measures of productivity--just the lazy 'how many lines of code' get checked in--our productivity was impaired about 25% over the last year," Newell said. "But that wasn't homogenous across all the different things that we do. Things that involved you going off and thinking--like pure code production, I already know what I'm gonna go write and I just know that I have a bunch of code that I need to write--that actually got a little bit better."

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Newell noted that it was the collaborative steps of projects that suffered the most and he doubted that Valve would ever have been able to ship a new product during the height of the pandemic.

Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais mirrored Newell's sentiment when it came to finalizing the Steam Deck's design. "If anything it reinforced my belief of the benefits of everyone being in the office and collaborating. When we were all split out trying to figure out the industrial design for [the Steam Deck] was going to be, it was really slowing us down and causing all kinds of challenges for the natural model of collaboration here which is everyone from all disciplines in the same room just discussing things and making really good decisions as a result."

Although not as bad as last year, the COVID-19 pandemic is still far from over. The CDC is once again advising people to mask up inside even if they've been vaccinated thanks to the ongoing spread of the new delta variant of the virus, with Valve HQ located in an area of "substantial" spread.

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