Portal 2 PC sold better than console SKU, says Valve

Valve boss Gabe Newell has said that sales of Portal 2 were better on PC than they were on either 360 or PS3.

While the 360 version was only a vanilla version of the game of sorts, the PS3 version included Steamworks support, including cloud save, cross-platform play and Steam achievements.

But Newell, speaking to Gamasutra, admitted that Left 4 Dead was one Valve series it had seen sell better on console than PC. The series has only appeared on 360 to date in terms of consoles.

"We can never predict; I mean we just try to build good games and then we tend to be surprised," he said when asked about a mindshare strategy for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

"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. 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."

Valve are kneedeep in development on DOTA 2 and Counter Strike GO, both of which are due to kick off with betas later this year and a full release next year.