Valve Laments Experiences with Xbox Live

The heads of Valve recently continued lamenting their experiences with Microsoft and Xbox Live, going so far as to liken their policies to a train wreck.

PC gamer published an interview today with Valve president Gabe Newell, project manager Erik Johnson, and marketing director Doug Lombardi about some of the company’s failures of recent times. One of the biggest ones on the list was how their products panned out on Xbox Live.

Valve assumed that Microsoft would eventually stop forcing developers to always charge for downloadable content, and were disappointed when they didn’t. “We thought that there would be something that would emerge, because we figured it was a sort of untenable,” Newell said. “Oh yeah, we understand that these are the rules now, but it’s such a train wreck that something will have to change,” where his thoughts at the time.

Valve had to charge for Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 DLC on 360 but offered it for free on PC. A wide gulf also emerged between those two versions of Team Fortress 2 where the 360 version only got a handful of for-pay updates and the PC version has now received over 100 free updates.

The guys at Valve told PC Gamer this hurt the worst out of all their failures. “Because it got all the way through to customers,” said Johnson. “It’s like a bug. If you fix a bug before it ever ships, it’s pretty cheap. If you ship it and then fix it, it’s really expensive.”

Valve holds a strong belief that DLC should be free, and they are carrying that through to PlayStation network with the PS3 version of Portal 2 where Sony is letting them incorporate Steamworks. This will allow Valve to introduce patches and DLC seamlessly and for free into that version of the game.

“We’re really happy with the current situation with the PS3,” Newell said. “We’re solving [the bug] now in a way that is going to work for our customers, rather than assuming something is going to emerge later that will allow us to fix this.”

This is a little bit of a reversal from Newell’s 2007 comments against the PS3 where he called it “a waste of everybody’s time.” Back then however, he was mainly talking about the platform’s hardware and development environment, which has been less comfortable to PC developers like Valve compared to the 360. Now however, Newell is praising Sony’s more open online infrastructure.