Valve To Reveal New Unannounced Game At gamescom 2012? [UPDATE: Debunked]

July 9th, 2012 · By Vic · 24 Comments

[UPDATE 2: In addition, Doug Lombardi (Valve's VP of marketing) has confirmed to us that Valve has no plans to show anything game-related at Gamescom:

We will have the Steam team there to meet with developers and publishers. No game showing planned.

Ouch. Well, there goes my grant money.]

[UPDATE: As it turns out, Gerald Bauser doesn't work for Gamescom's organizers, and therefore, the profile in question is illegitimate. Sorry, folks - just another false alarm!]

Our resident Australian tracker and editor, Mimaz, has made a rather intriguing discovery (all credit goes to him for finding it, as he merely offered me the honor of writing about it). On the LinkedIn profile of Gerald Bauser, Project Manager of Programming for gamescom 2012 (set to take place from the 16th to the 19th of August), Mimaz found a list of publicity programs set to be on display at gamescom, that Gerald is currently overseeing.

On the list, there is a wide variety of games that are set to be released in the near future, which will be presented publically at gamescom 2012. This is the list. We’ve taken the liberty of placing the interesting bit in bold:

Activision Blizzard – Call of Duty®: Black Ops 2 PC, 360, PS3 and World of Warcraft expansion (from 3 months)
Konami – Metal Gear® Rising: Revengence (ongoing)
Electronic Arts – Medal of Honor Warfighter ™, Crysis ® 3 and Need for Speed ​​™ Most Wanted (3 months) PC, 360, PS3
Rockstar games – Grand Theft Auto V and Table Tennis Tournament 2 – (4 months) PC, 360, PS3
Arenanet – Guild Wars® 3 (in progress) PC, 360, PS3
Valve – Coming Soon (in progress)
Ubisoft – Assassin’s Creed 3 (for 5 months) PC; 360, PS3
Reef Entertainment – Coming Soon (2 months)

As you can see, among all the upcoming high-caliber games, lies a mention of an unannounced Valve title, noted simply as: “Coming Soon“. This clearly denotes that it is an unannounced and secretive game project (no platforms are even specified).

I can only assume that the “(in progress)” written next to it, is meant to represent the planning timeline for the game’s representation. In this case, it would seem that planning for Valve’s mysterious showing appears to still be in progress, which would indicate that the decision to reveal the unannounced project at Gamescom may still be a relatively recent development.

Of course, there’s also the mention of ArenaNet’s Guild Wars 3 there, which does sound a bit… suspicious, considering Guild Wars 2 isn’t even out yet. It also says “PC, 36o, PS3“, when Guild Wars 1 and 2 are PC-exclusive games. In addition, Gerald has… exactly zero professional connections over LinkedIn, which is also odd… so I’m not sure. It could very well be fake, at this point.

In any case, we have contacted Valve for comment, and will let you know as soon as we receive a response. Apart from that, we know nothing else at this time. With gamescom a month away, it’s gonna be a long wait until we can find out exactly what this is all about. Still, let’s all try to keep our expectations under control, for the time being – just in case this is another false alarm.

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