Speaking to PC Gamer in an interview published as part of a special week of Valve coverage, members of the Half-Life developer have been openly discussing mistakes made by the studio.
“PS3, so far,” offered project manager Erik Johnson. “The way we’ve dealt with those customers so far, and the product that they have. And the lack of updates on the 360, for TF2, is also a total failure. Those are the ones that sting the worst because it got all the way through to customers. 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. Those ones are really bad.”
Valve boss Gabe Newell said: “That’s why we’re really happy with the current situation with the PS3… We’re solving it 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.”
Referring to Xbox, Newell said he’s disappointed Microsoft doesn’t allow developers to update their products more regularly.
“We thought that there would be something that would emerge, because we figured it was a sort of untenable… Oh yeah, we understand that these are the rules now, but it’s such a train wreck that something will have to change.”
Speaking recently about plans to bring the Steamworks development suite to PS3, which will allow for auto updates to its titles among other features, Johnson praised the open platform nature of Sony’s console, while also hinting at frustration over Microsoft’s more closed approach to Xbox 360.
"Part of the reason the PS3 project is so exciting to us is because fundamentally Sony views the PS3 as a very open platform for developers and that's kind of what we feel like,” he told CVG. “It is better for developers but more importantly it's better for customers to have as many choices of software to run on whatever device they have. Having Steam on that platform is incredibly valuable to us. In a lot of ways that is the way we define a customer having a good experience because it's the way that we keep talking to that customer over time.
"We think customers would like [Steam on Xbox 360]. We'd love to try that," although he added that the decision is "not up to us".