Gabe Newell, CEO of Valve, has not been a huge fan of the PS3 in the not-so-distant past. In fact, the man has been quoted as saying that it was a “waste of everyone’s time.”
So it was an odd pill to swallow this year at E3 when Newell emerged at Sony’s conference to announce that not only were they were slated to support the console with their Steamworks infrastructure, but that they were going to throw Portal 2 in just for good measure. Now, stranger still, it seems they’ve turned their guns on Microsoft, as a new quote from the outspoken CEO has emerged calling Xbox Live “such a train wreck.”
“We thought that there would be something that would emerge, because we figured it was a sort of untenable,” Newell told PC Gamer about Microsoft’s rules for downloadable content and updates.”Oh yeah, we understand that these are the rules now, but it’s such a train wreck that something will have to change.”
To be fair, Valve has reason to be bitter, as they’ve been quarreling with the publisher for years over title update pricing for the online service; three of their games, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 suffer significantly on the console for a lack of free updates that their PC and Mac equivalents enjoy. Still, both the vehemence and timeliness of the snippet are more than a little strange.
