Valve: Portal 2 Sold Better On PC Than Consoles

Valve co-founder Gabe Newell told Gamasutra in a recent interview that critically-acclaimed first-person puzzler Portal 2 sold more copies on PC than it did on consoles. However, he was quick to stress that the company couldn't have predicted this about the title, released in April, especially looking at past multi-platform releases. "We can never predict; I mean we just try to build good games and then we tend to be surprised," he explained. "Portal 2 did better on the PC than it did on the consoles; Left 4 Dead did better on the consoles than it did on the PC." "So you know we don't try to guess, because we're not sure what value there is to guessing," he said. "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." Newell said in June that Portal 2 sales had reached 3 million units, but did not break down sales by platform. Discussing the move to put Portal 2 on PlayStation 3 with specific Steam functionality, Newell explained, "Portal 2 customers on the PlayStation 3 are really happy. So I feel good about that." Are PS3 Portal 2 owners getting a better deal than Xbox 360 users? "I think that they're going to be more happy in the future as we take advantage of the capabilities that we have on the PlayStation 3 that we don't have on the 360," he said. "It definitely seems that Sony is more willing to allow those things," he continued. "I think that Sony's made a really smart set of decisions about their approach, and that they'll continue to garner more and more benefits from that approach going forward." The full interview can be found now, live on Gamasutra.