Gabe Newell Q&A

One-on-one with Valve’s Gabe Newell on Videogaming247 converses with the Vale honcho on a variety of topics, including how he gets approached "a couple of times a week" by potential investors or buyers, future Steam plans that include peer-to-peer functionality, how Left4Dead is progressing, and more. On the inevitable topic of PCs versus consoles he makes a point about how updating PC games is more flexible, and how they are under pressure by the console overlords to charge for the updates they provide to PC users for free:
The big concern I have right now is our ability to provide updates. On the PC side, we’ve done as many as four updates in a day, and that’s great: we can respond very quickly. If Nvidia puts out a new graphics driver and it changes some way about how texture management works, then before our customers know there’s any issue then the problem has gone away.

Or we can do the Pyro updates, and the Medic updates [and so on]. On the consoles, they want us to charge money for them, because that’s in their model, and our model is very much more to grow the community by giving out free updates. That’s harder for us.