Full Interview regarding this:
Erik Johnson: Favourite conversation of ours! PS3, so far. The way we've dealt with those customers so far, and the product that they have, and the lack of updates on the 360 for TF2 is also a total failure. Those are the ones that sting the worst because…
Doug Lombardi: There's actual ramifications.
Erik Johnson: Because it got all the way through to customers. It's like a bug. If you fix a bug before it ever ships, it's pretty cheap. If you ship it and then fix it, it's really expensive. Those ones are really bad.
Gabe Newell: That's why we're really happy with the current situation with the PS3… We're solving it now in a way that is going to work for our customers, rather than assuming something is going to emerge later that will allow us to fix this.
PC Gamer: Was the mistake on the Xbox side to think that Microsoft would let you update it more often?
Gabe Newell: We thought that there would be something that would emerge, because we figured it was a sort of untenable… "Oh yeah, we understand that these are the rules now, but it's such a train wreck that something will have to change."
Erik Johnson: We did kind of blindly go off and build… you know what we've done in TF2 because you've played TF2, right? We built a lot of things. So there is this business issue of how do you keep delivering software, which we did kind of think we could resolve in some way. Market forces are dictating it should be resolved. But then memory's a problem for us now – we've added all these things, so you have to consider those budgets at this point.
Erik Johnson: I mean it's a trade-off. I don't know how to evaluate that trade-off today. TF2 on the PC side has delivered a huge amount of value, but we've screwed up on the other side.
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