For those of you who haven’t noticed, Valve hasn’t really put games on consoles in a long time. Why is that you may ask? Well, Gabe Newell answered that question using Apple as an analogy. Yes, he actually did that! In a recent press briefing, Newell was asked why they didn’t develop for outside hardware. According to DualShockers, Newell claims “Valve is sick and tired of jumping through hoops necessary for developing on consoles.” He said:
“There have been cases where we’ve updated products five to six times in a day. When we did the original iOS…Steam App…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.”
First of all, the fact that he’s comparing developing for consoles to developing on Apple’s restrictive hardware is fallacious. I don’t know about Sony, but Microsoft made many changes to how patches worked on their device. You can submit as many as you like and the company doesn’t charge $50,000 or whatever they used to before. The process is quick as well and I’ve seen certain patches go up the same day they’ve been announced. New games take up to a week to be certified after they’ve been tested. There hasn’t been a single case where a patch was delayed by six months.
Newell’s statements are bizarre to say the least and don’t reflect how Microsoft operates nowadays. Maybe there’s a simpler answer to this. Maybe Valve hasn’t developed anything worthwhile in recent years that they can actually put on consoles. I don’t see another Portal game coming from the studio or another Half-Life title. Maybe Newell should’ve said “we haven’t anything worthwhile for the market” instead of using Apple as a comparison when it’s not even remotely accurate.
Source: DualShockers
Asher is a games journalist, former News Writer (Gaming) at Windows Central. They contributed 1110 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: wrote over 1,100 ICXM pieces on Xbox news, hardware reviews, and platform commentary before joining Future plc’s Windows Central in 2017.