Half-Life developer Valve released plenty of games on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, but they haven’t released anything on the current generation of consoles. When asked about this at a recent media roundtable, Valve president Gabe Newell explained the company’s reasoning. Newell said that the company’s disinterest comes from Valve getting “really frustrated working in walled gardens.”
Newell cited a poor experience with Apple as to why he prefers to release games on PC, where they don’t have to deal with another company’s closed ecosystem. “There have been cases where we’ve updated products 5-6 times in a day,” Newell told Eurogamer, who attended the media event. “When we did the original iOS of Steam App, right, we shipped it, we got a whole bunch of feedback and like the next day we’re ready to do an update. We weren’t able to get that update out for six months! And we couldn’t find out why they wouldn’t release it! They wouldn’t tell us. This is the life that you have in these environments. And finally they shipped it! And they wouldn’t tell us why they finally shipped it.”
The explanation makes sense for Valve, as they are in a position where they simply don’t need the console market. They can do whatever they want with their own products on PC without any issues, and being tied down by Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft’s regulations wouldn’t make much sense for a company that doesn’t want to deal with it.
“I’m sure that other people are wildly successful in those environments,” said Newell. “But [our sort of] DNA tends to not work well when someone is trying to insert a lot of process between us and our customers.”
(Source: Eurogamer)
