Valve owns up to its 'failures' with PS3 and 360

As part of a series of interviews with PC Gamer, the folks at Valve recently gave out a laundry list of failures on the company's part. Many readers will be familiar with many on the list, including early versions of Team Fortress 2, the flying fairy game and, more recently, mistakenly banning over 12,000 Modern Warfare 2 players. Of particular note on the list were Valve's failures regarding the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Valve's Erik Johnson lamented the way the company has dealt with the PS3, and also referred to the lack of Team Fortress 2 updates on the Xbox 360 as "a total failure." Johnson noted that these failures are worse than internal failures, saying, "If you fix a bug before it ever ships, it's pretty cheap. If you ship it and then fix it, it's really expensive." Gabe Newell added that the company is "really happy with the current situation with the PS3."

Concerning the lack of TF2 updates on Xbox, Newell admits that Valve built the game assuming that Microsoft would eventually change some of its Xbox Live rules (thought he didn't elaborate on the nature of said rules). "We thought that there would be something that would emerge," said Newell, "because we figured it was a sort of untenable." He added that Valve understood Microsoft's rules when it made TF2, but they were "such a train wreck" that the company assumed they would "have to change" eventually.