Inevitably, fan speculations about the Half Life 3 project began to spread wildly across the gaming community, which became further strengthened by leaked information from Valve's internal bug-tracking Jira database confirming that there are two development groups involved with the project, one marked 'Half-Life 3' with 46 staff members and another one marked 'Half-Life 3 Core' with 10 staff members. As of June 17th, 2013, both comics received respectively more than 990 and 5,400 Facebook likes. On June 8th, 2012, and April 2nd, 2013, Julia Lepetit and Andrew Bridgman submitted 2 comics to the videogame humor sharing website Dorkly about the constant excitement of Half-Life 3 and the common release claims on April Fools' day. Both the rumors and the confirmation on the new engine lead to various websites speculating it to be the reason Half-Life 3 was delayed numerous times, such as VG 24/7, Joystiq, Eurogamer, Trusted Reviews and Now Gamer. This was later confirmed during a visit of 4chan's /v/ (videogames) board at Valve in celebration of Gabe Newell's 50th birthday (shown below) in early November of the same year. In early August of 2012, numerous rumors were released which speculated that Valve was working on a new gaming engine. Prior to large gaming events, such as the Electronic Entertainment Expo, speculations on the announcement of Half-Life 3 are often made surrounding Valve's presentation during the events, which are commonly later debunked by various gaming websites as it becomes clear the sequel won't appear during the event. The following day a second piece titled 'Half-Life 3 confirmed' was posted on the site Team Rebellion. The interview was reported on the next day by SK-Gaming in a piece titled 'Half-Life 3 confirmed'. Following the release of Episode 2, in an exclusive interview with on December 12, 2007, Valve marketing director, Doug Lombardi stated that a third entry in the main Half-Life series would happen following the end of the Episodes. Instead, Episode Two was released over a year after Episode One, and Half-Life 2: Episode Three, which was supposed to follow 6 months after Episode 2, has been delayed indefinitely.

Originally, Valve intended to release the episodes 6 months apart. This was followed by Half-Life 2: Episode One on June 1, 2006, and Half Life 2: Episode Two on October 10, 2007. On November 16, 2004, Valve released Half-Life 2, the sequel to the original game. Valve's Half-Life franchise started on November 19th, 1998, and was as well the debut title of Valve Software.

Half life 3 actually confirmed