Do you feel comfortable with doing console versions? To be absolutely blunt, is it purely a money thing? Or, aesthetically, does it make you happy to be able to deliver 360 versions?
I think the 360’s a great platform for Left 4 Dead. The 360 players that come in and play the game are really happy with it. So yeah, I think we’re comfortable.
The difficulty comes in continuing to try to broaden how many different platforms we’re doing simultaneously. We’ll do better over time.
The big concern I have right now is our ability to provide updates. On the PC side, we’ve done as many as four updates in a day, and that’s great: we can respond very quickly. If Nvidia puts out a new graphics driver and it changes some way about how texture management works, then before our customers know there’s any issue then the problem has gone away.
Or we can do the Pyro updates, and the Medic updates [and so on]. On the consoles, they want us to charge money for them, because that’s in their model, and our model is very much more to grow the community by giving out free updates. That’s harder for us.
And then on the consoles they have pretty lengthy certification periods, and we’re pretty happy that our customers think that we do a good job on the quality side of updates, and we don’t need someone looking over our shoulder checking to make sure that we’re not going to screw our customers with a bad update.
Interview with Valve's Gabe Newell
Posted on Tuesday, August 26 2008 @ 3:50 CEST by Thomas De MaesschalckVigeogaming247 had an interview with Gabe Newell from Valve, you can read it over here. Here's a snip about what he thinks about developing for consoles. One of the things that seems to bother him is that it's not easy to give Xbox 360 players updates:
