Though we can’t say we approve of the way CVG has milked every single revelation in their interview with Valve’s marketing VP Doug Lombardi, we still have to hand the publication’s Mike Jackson an enormous cookie for bringing us such an excellent, far-reaching interview. Without treading on the original source too much, here are the highlights:
Call it bias if you will, but Valve isn’t so interested in PlayStation 3 — there are no plans to port co-op zombiefest Left 4 Dead to Sony’s black n’ blue:
Lombardi: We’re not PS3 developers - we’re doing PC and 360 like with Orange Box. EA came to us and said “Wow, Orange box was an incredible project, can we do a PS3 version?”
Left 4 Dead doesn’t have that guaranteed appeal yet - it’s a new IP. If you mention a new Half-Life, people want to make as many versions of it as possible. If Left 4 Dead is big, then we may see a PS3 version later, or if and when we do a sequel, people may be more interested in that. We’re only 150 people, so there’s only so many things we can do.
But that doesn’t mean they aren’t willing to try new things. Like the Wii, for example:
[…]There’s a lot of people at Valve who are parents and would love to make a game for kids. We all play the Wii a lot and we think that the proper way for Valve to approach the Wii would be to make something cool designed specifically for Wii.
I mean, I’m not making any announcements but there’s a lot of desire internally to do something for kids, do something on the Wii.
Or how about a nice MMO:
Gabe’s [Valve co-founder, Gabe Newell] a huge fan of MMORPGs and he’s always wanted to make one, but that’s a big risk to venture out on. I think at some point you’ll see us move a little further out of our comfort zone than Portal was, but it’s not going to be this year or next.
But after hearing this, we just want our Portal 2.
Now we’ve got this challenge of living up to what we did with that. People gave it a lot of kudos for being so innovative so, in Valve’s tradition, when we hit something, we’re not just going to pump out more and cash in on the success of the first one.
We see it as a challenge to really innovate. If Portal was so innovative that it won all these GotY awards, then Portal 2 has to be even more so.
Tags: Doug Lombardi, mmo, Portal, PS3, Valve, wii
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