As a fan made petition calling for Valve to release more information on Half-Life 3 nears 60,000 signatories, Valve’s Big Boss Gabe Newell has announced, anticlimactically, that he understands fan’s frustrations.

“It’s pretty frustrating to us when we put them into that situation. We try to go as fast as we can and we try to pick the things that we think are going to be most valuable to our customers,” Mr. Newell told the Penny Arcade Report’s Ben Kuchera in response to a question about Valve’s long turn around times.

“If there’s some magic way we can get more work done in a day then we’d love to hear about it, but we recognize that it’s been a long time whereas we have so many games that people really love, and at the same time we want to be making sure that those games and those stories and those characters are moving forward while also making sure that we don’t just get into terminal sequelitis,” continued Mr. Newell.

Admitting Valve learned some lessons from the protracted release process of Half-Life 2, Mr. Newell said, “We’re trying to be careful not to get people too excited and then have to go and disappoint them.”

“We’re sort of reacting in the other direction and saying ‘okay, well let’s have things a little more baked before we start getting people all excited about it’.”

Half-Life 2 was released on November 16, 2004, and a sequel was initially expected sometime in 2007-2008.