PC gamers prefer puzzles? Xbox gamers prefer shooting things? Gabe Newell.
Gabe Newell recently spoke to Gamasutra about Steam and the workings of Valve. One interesting point was the difference Valve found between PC gamers and console owners in relation to two of their biggest games.
Newell explained how Portal 2 "did better" on PCs than it did on consoles, and that Left 4 Dead 2 did better on the Xbox 360 than it did on the PC, despite the PC version considered the 'better' version with free updates and mods.
We can never predict. We just try to build good games and then we tend to be surprised
We don’t try to guess, because we’re not sure what value there is to guessing. We’ve never had a situation where we said, We really, really want to build something that is more popular for the console guys. Because usually we have a bunch of other higher priority problems we want to solve. So we’re glad that people want to play our games wherever they want to play.
Steam doesn't publish it's exact numbers of games sold, so we might never know the exact difference in sales between the two, but as a part of the PC fanbase, it's interesting to see that the PCers preferred complex 3D spacial puzzles over shooting and blowing up zombies.
But then, I really REALLY enjoy the latter too.
[via PCGamer]
