Opening The Valve: The Gabe Newell Interview on G4tv.com hears from the Valve boss as well as Doug Lombardi about the announcement of Left 4 Dead 2. Gabe describes the project management considerations in planning the sequel, talking about some smaller projects actually coming out on time, and their assumption fans would be "super excited" about a Left 4 Dead sequel. He also talks about continuing to develop for both games, how Xbox limitations are going to impact the PC version, and how they are trying not to screw PS3 customers "again." They go on to discuss the evolving games as a service business, but when asked about Half-Life 2: Episode 3, Gabe refuses to regret the decision to make a quick series of episodic expansions that has turned out to have taken years now. He says they can't talk about Episode 3 right now, but they are happy with how the decision to make the episodes has turned out:

I want to make sure that I don’t sound like I’m dismissing user’s issues, right? I get a ton of email everyday saying why aren’t you talking about Episode 3? And there are very good reasons why we’re not talking about Episode 3, which I can’t talk about yet, but I will. So, I think there’s frustration there and I’m not somehow going to say that that’s not legitimate or length isn’t a concern or regularity. The speed with which these updates are coming out, people say, “Hey, gee, these episodes are supposed to be shorter and you take 25 years to ship each one.” So, I don’t wanna somehow dismiss those, or sort of throw them under - but I think we’re in much better shape than would have been, in terms of our ability to move stuff, technology, products, uh, forward faster by changing how, ya know, being different than, ya know, there was Half-Life 2 and then there was post-Half-Life 2 in terms of how we were approaching these things and yea, I think that we’re overall pretty happy without somehow dismissing the legitimate complaints that people should have towards us. But, we’re happy with that choice that we made.