Interviews// Valve's Doug Lombardi

SPOnG: Do you think having made a big console push will affect your episodic model at all?

DL: No, I don't think so, I think that there's a number of ways to package the content at retail, whether it's what we're doing with Orange Box and Portal and TF2 (Team Fortress 2) and Episode 2 for the consoles, and I think before too long we're going to see more than just the arcade games sold over the wire to the console. So, theoretically, if we wanted to sell just Episode 3 to Xbox 360 and PS3 owners, by the time we get to Episode 3, I'm guessing that it won't be a first.


SPOnG: So you think it's going to become more viable to put 'core' games onto online console services, as opposed to just the casual and retro games?

DL: I hope so! I mean, we've found that giving customers more choices is always a good thing. For us, setting up Steam was just like setting up another store and, instead of driving your car to it, you drove your computer to it. We've found that there's a number of people who like to get their products that way, and there's still a number of people that like to go to the (traditional) store.

We're happy to support both avenues. I mean, all roads lead to a game sale, and that's positive. It's like building a city, however many roads you can build into a city: it's usually better for things.


SPOnG: You built Steam because there was no-one else really doing it, right?

DL: Yeah, that's right. We had some great success with the first Team Fortress, building a multi-player audience, then Counter Strike obviously exploded in our face, and we said, 'Wow! We've got all these customers who we want to give updates to, and give content to', and every time we did an engine revision, or a rev to Counter Strike, we'd have to issue the old monolithic patch, and we see the player numbers just go like this (gestures downwards) when we issued the patch and when they were down here we'd be praying 'Please let them come back', and they would, but it was kind of scary.

We were releasing stuff, back then, maybe every month or so, or something like that. So the genesis of it was we needed to get something to auto-update the games, and then a list of other features started falling in, like anti-cheat, anti-piracy, and then once you go down that road you think maybe we could sell the games down the wire or what have you.

So, we went and we talked to Yahoo, and Microsoft, and Real Networks, Cisco, everyone who was doing internet stuff at the time. This is back in '99 or 2000 I guess, maybe 2001, and people were like, 'Yeah, we've thought about that, but there's nothing going right now'. So, we just said OK, we're going to have to start going down this path ourselves.


SPOnG: And that was a big shift for you guys? Going from developing games to selling them?

DL: Oh yeah, it was radical! You've got to remember that at the time we'd only done Half Life 1, Team Fortress and Counter Strike. And Team Fortress and Counter Strike arguably came to us from the mod community. You know, Robin (Walker) and John (Cook) moved from Australia and came to the States and brought Team Fortress with them, and Minh - 'Gooseman' - Le and Cliffe (Jess Cliffe) came from – Minh was in Canada and Cliffe was in Virginia – they came to us with early versions of Counter Strike and we just helped them extend what they're ideas were. Valve was still in its infancy at the time.

You look at it now and you say, 'Oh, Valve's got five or six different game properties, and it's 140 people, and it's on three floors of a big building'. Back then, I think we were 22 guys on a half a floor in some accountant's building.

At the time it seemed insane, but we believed in the need for those features, and in the absence of anyone else doing it, Gabe (Newell) decided, 'We have to do it, we have to move ahead', and like many interesting moments in Valve's history, Gabe's bullishness on the vision and making sure we're attending to what the customers need, (making) a better experience and trying to move things forward instead of just turning the crank, was the key.