Interviews// Valve's Doug Lombardi

SPOnG: Development with Steam is fairly organic then?

DL:These things just sort of tumble like that. We're looking at a lot of stuff in the community, stuff that we've issued so far, and collecting ideas and saying, 'OK, well if we can set up groups and schedule times for stuff and people can set up pages, then there's a million other things that you want to do to follow stuff.' And being able to send text messages, and being able to do more from the web interface, so that if you're not actually on Steam at the moment, say you're at an airport terminal or whatever you can do stuff. (We're) moving more of that there.

A lot of what we're doing over the next couple of months specifically, and with the launch of Orange Box – specifically Team Fortress – is to bring a lot of stats and ranking-type stuff to the Steam community and to your Steam ID. So if you're playing Team Fortress your Steam ID will spit out this thing – we're tracking stats based on your performance against your own performance, as well as where you rank in the world.

If you're Number 500 in the world, it's maybe interesting. If you're Number 5,000, it's like, 'Who cares', right?' But if you're having your best run as a sniper that you've ever had, that's interesting. So we're trying to track personal bests and all those kinds of things. And a lot of that will start to manifest itself into the Steam community, so that people can realise, 'Oh, this guy's a badass, I'll invite him onto my team', or 'This guy's kind of a turkey, let's kick him off the team.' (Grins)

SPOnG: That's brutal!

DL: That's life! That's Darwinism.


SPOnG: In the past you guys have obviously been pretty big supporters of PC gaming. How come you're making such a big push onto the PS3 and 360 now?

DL: To get the game to more players, really. I have way too many friends who have said, 'I want to play your games, but I don't spend a lot of money on a PC.' People tend to think that because we've sold so many copies of Half Life and Half Life 2, everybody's played it, and it's just not true. I mean, 8 million copies of Half Life and 6 million copies of Half Life 2 or whatever it is, that's still only a small percentage of the total gamer pie. These next-generation consoles are connected to the internet, they've got really powerful graphics processing that's kind of based on PC graphics processing architecture. So, 'Why are we not doing that?' is the better question.


SPOnG: Has the porting been a smooth process?

DL: Yeah, I mean we started working on Xbox internally, we started a very small group with Counter Strike for Xbox 1, and then we did Half Life 2 for Xbox 1 internally as well, so we've been moving our tools slowly but surely over to the Xbox for the last three of four years. So, when we got to the 360, because we'd already got the source running on Xbox 1, we got sort of drunk on the power. It's like, 'We got it into budget on Xbox! Now we can be all fat and sassy on the 360.'

So, for us that's been a great process. We've got a team internally that's built up around that, and now the engine's there, bringing over the content is – I won't say trivial – but it's a pretty straight-forward process.

The PS3 work is being done over here (England not Germany, actually, Ed) in Guildford by the EA guys, and they're doing a great job, but I'm not in their office every day, so I don't want to speak for them.