Valve: Sony, Microsoft Looking to Charge Gamers for Team Fortress 2 Updates

Though Valve has hoped to release Team Fortress 2 add-on content as a free download for console users, company co-founder Gabe Newell now says that the console business model is getting in the way.

"The big concern I have right now is our ability to provide updates," said Newell to videogaming247. "On the PC side, we've done as many as four updates in a day, and that's great: we can respond very quickly."

Newell continued:

If Nvidia puts out a new graphics driver and it changes some way about how texture management works, then before our customers know there's any issue then the problem has gone away. Or we can do the Pyro updates, and the Medic updates [and so on]. On the consoles, they want us to charge money for them, because that's in their model, and our model is very much more to grow the community by giving out free updates. That's harder for us.And then on the consoles they have pretty lengthy certification periods, and we're pretty happy that our customers think that we do a good job on the quality side of updates, and we don't need someone looking over our shoulder checking to make sure that we're not going to screw our customers with a bad update.

Valve marketing director Doug Lombardi told Shacknews in May that DLC for the Xbox 360 version of Team Fortress 2 would likely be announced "soon."

"How and when is still sort of being determined, on pricing and that kind of stuff," said Lombardi at the time. "On the PC it's sort of wide open, you can release stuff whenever you want. On the console there's a little bit more of a pathway."