Valve Founder Gabe Newell Calls Consoles ‘Walled Gardens’

Valve is known for creating some of the most popular video game titles in the world, including the Left 4 Dead series, the Portal series, and the global phenomenon that is Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The company released some of these games to last generation consoles to a great reception. Current generation consoles have received no such attention from Valve because Founder Gabe Newell thinks that the game boxes are “Walled Gardens.”

Steam is currently one of the biggest digital retailers of video games for PCs, but Valve started originally as a video game maker. Some of its biggest titles made it to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, but current generations, which are outpacing their predecessors in terms of the number of units sold will have to do without Valve’s lineup of games, Eurogamer reports.

During a media roundtable that was held at the company’s office, which the publication attended, Newell expressed his disappointment with regards to the inflexibility of consoles. He seems particularly annoyed at how console companies perceive the concept of free-to-play.

“We get really frustrated working in walled gardens," Newell told reporters. "So you try to talk to someone who's doing product planning on a console about free-to-play games and they say 'Oh, we're not sure free-to-play is a good idea' and you're like 'the ship has left'."

Two of Valve’s biggest titles are Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2, both of which are free-to-play. The rest do cost money, however.

There is also the matter of the troubles that Valve encounters when working with other companies that deal in software, Gamespresso reports. One example that the company’s founder brought up was their iOS app that was released a while back.

Newell notes how slow the update release was, which significantly affected its performance. When the app became available, Valve immediately acted on some of the negative feedback in order to address the issues brought up. However, it took Apple six months to actually release the patch without telling Valve why.