Could it be that piracy hasn't actually killed PC gaming?

Aug 31, 2011 19:51 GMT  ·  By

Valve boss Gabe Newell has revealed that his company's newest game, Portal 2, managed to sell better on the PC than on consoles like the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, surprising the company which expected the new title to follow the foot steps of Left 4 Dead 2, which appealed more to console owners.

Portal 2 was released back in April in the arms of millions of gamers all around the world, who were more than impressed, alongside reviewers, with the high-quality title from Valve Software.

The company's boss, Gabe Newell, has now shared a bit of insight into how sales for Portal 2 went, while explaining that it's a bit hard to predict just how a game will perform once it's released into the wild.

"We just try to build good games and then we tend to be surprised," he explained to Gamasutra. "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."

Newell emphasized that Valve wants to bring a great experience on all platforms, so it's not trying to make games better geared towards consoles or PCs, because most of the times it's just polishing off elements in order to behave properly on all devices.

"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," he added. "So we're glad that people want to play our games wherever they want to play."

While Valve is notoriously secretive about its sales figures, especially on Steam, Newell confirmed back in June that 3 million copies of Portal 2 were already sold around the world.