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Valve doesn’t appear all that keen to work on console and iOS products, telling those at a media roundtable attended by Eurogamer that the company gets “really frustrated working in walled gardens”.
When Newell says walled gardens, he refers to the issues Valve has faced when bringing apps and games to the console and mobile space, despite having seen The Orange Box, Portal 2, Left 4 Dead and CS:GO launch on consoles.
“So you try to talk to someone who’s doing product planning on a console about free-to-play games and they say ‘Oh, we’re not sure free-to-play is a good idea’ and you’re like ‘the ship has left’,” Newell said when discussing the differences of PC and console development.
Moving onto iOS, Newell said: “There have been cases where we’ve updated products 5-6 times in a day.
“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.”
“We’re just too stupid to know how to be a successful iOS developer,” he continued. “‘Cause for us, everything that we do, is to make our lives easier and build tools to make other software developer’s lives easier.”
Newell isn’t blinkered to the success some have achieved in mobile and console spaces, but for Valve it’s all about PC.
“We love the PC right now. A lot,” he concluded.
During the same roundtable Newell revealed Valve is working on three full VR titles.
Source: Eurogamer
