Valve, in all their awesomeness, has been trying to release all new TF2 content to the consoles free of charge, unfortunately Microsoft doesn’t feel the same way. Valve Founder, Gabe Newell says the console gaming model is getting in the way. “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.” says Newell at GC08 to videogaming247.
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.And then on the consoles they have pretty lengthy certification periods, and we’re pretty happy that our customers think that we do a good job on the quality side of updates, and we don’t need someone looking over our shoulder checking to make sure that we’re not going to screw our customers with a bad update.
I could possibly understand it if Sony were to do it: they have to cover the infrastructure costs to roll out new updates. But Microsoft, come on — you already make your users pay for your service, why make them pay for something that not even the developer thinks they should be charged for? Shame on you.
Update: Sorry folks, I originally said this applied to Sony as well. There is no news of Sony charging for a TF2 update yet. Shame on me.
