Valve On Steam: Part Two

Life is filled with risks. [Laughs]. Who knows? I mean we've charged ahead with this, and we'll see what happens in the future. Lucky for us if we make a killer version of Portal 2 for the Mac, it'll sell regardless of whether we're selling it or Apple's selling it, and we'll be happy. The future is unknown.

Looking at how you do that, how you actually spend the money, and thinking about the platforms is like saying oh I'm doing this ad to drive this platform or what have you, is really I think old school and tied to the old print mentality. So when I was managing the budget for Half-life 1 about 60-70 per cent of the dollars were going to print and in that case, even though Half-Life is a bad example because it was PC only, had that been multi-platform, platform spending would have mattered. Because I needed to spend in PlayStation magazine, OXM for those ads blah blah blah.

Today, the websites are all multi-platform. If you're doing television ads, which are where a big, big percentage of where the dollars are going, those are all multi-platform. If I'm buying on a premiere football game, is that a console buy or is that a PC buy, or is it both? I don't know. I'm just advertising the brand and the project and the game. So, it's really really hard to say that we're doing something that's Mac-specific or even PlayStation-specific anymore. So I guess I just don't really think of it that way, of being divvied up by platform and I don't think anyone else here does when we get set to spend the tens of millions of dollars that we put behind this titles worldwide.

Well I'll put it really concretely. Of the $25 million that we spent for Left 4 Dead 2, which came out on PC and Xbox, only two different platforms, at least $23 million of it was spent just promoting the brand and the game. Without any thought of it was PC or Xbox. We were advertising Left 4 Dead 2.

The piece I would add, you were asking about advertising the Mac version, the other advantage we have in the case of Portal 2 – the PC and Mac version are the same thing.

Absolutely. That's the same box in the same place to the same people. So we don't think about it as you have to go buy a box that says a Mac on it or do specific advertising for that.

That's also gotten worse as you've talked about; we've gone from being on two platforms with Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 to four platforms now with Portal 2, with PlayStation 3 and Mac being added. So I think that whole thing gets diluted even further as you add more platforms to it. It seems that's more the norm for other games to be on multiple platforms. We're sort of one of the last hold-outs to being on only one or two platforms. It seems like most games that come out now are on like 14 different platforms...

Right, exactly [laughs].

Did you guys talk about our Commodore 64 version of Portal 2? Big news!

I'm crusty, the one I always have to slag is the Atari Jaguar, but I wasn't going to go there...

Well, it's forever going to be competing with Half-Life 2. Everything that we do competes with Half-Life 2. That was a huge, huge launch. It was six million or something in the first year, so we're always chasing that one. But yeah, Portal 2's going to be really, really big. Coming out of E3 with the way it showed there and the awards we won there and adding Mac and PlayStation 3, it's definitely going to be the biggest one we've done since Half-Life 2. ...

Well, it was a different world. Pre-orders back in the day weren't as big a deal as they are today. Console games get pre-ordered a lot more than PC games. That was true then, that's still true now. Half-Life 2 was PC only. In Europe, the idea of pre-ordering really has only come in to vogue pretty recently, and really the UK is the only one that does it in big numbers. So it was a different time, and the multi-platform thing adds to the pre-order thing.

Plus the thing that happened with Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 was both of those just started taking off versus our forecasts. Part of it was the pre-order thing which has been phenomenal and our biggest in history, but also the game catching us by surprise a little bit in how it performed. Both the first and second time. The first time was the number one new IP in 2008, and was EA's best-selling title for that year. It achieved some things that I don't think anybody thought it would six months before it came out. Left 4 Dead 1 is special. ...

Oh, you're talking about the conspiracy monopolist theories... Y'know, I would point you as I probably would back then to other people – ask a group of people who work with us. Don't ask us. We're always going to say people love us. If I tell you my kids are handsome, you're not going to believe me. If someone else tells you they're handsome you'll believe them. ...

– Doug, you have very beautiful children. ...

Laughter.]

Yeah, we're unsure as to how they came up with those numbers, so commenting on them would feel strange. ...

[Laughs] It does point to what we've been trying to say forever which is that the PC is not dying, the business is just moving elsewhere. And to their credit, they're starting to make strides to give everyone that information and paint a more complete picture. But again those reports that came out weren't based on any data that we've provided, so it is what is. ...

There's no Linux version that we're working on right now. ...