Valve: Portal 2 Sold Better On PC Than Console

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Given the meteoric rise in the popularity of console gaming over the past few years, you’d be forgiven in thinking that PC gaming was on the way out. Indeed it seemed like that might the case for a while, but this little thing called digital distribution caught on and sparked a new interest in the platform.

Valve seems to be at the forefront of this digital revolution with their platform Steam, but honestly, I still expect games like Portal 2 to sell better on consoles than on PC, simply because there’s just more console gamers out there.

As it turns out, that isn’t the case, with Gabe Newell reporting that Portal 2 actually did better on PC than it did on consoles in an interview with 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. 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.

Of course, one game selling well on PC isn’t reason to run around saying “PC is the best!” but, contrary to what we’ve been hearing, it certainly isn’t dead. Now, if we can just get publishers to stop treating paying customers like criminals, we’ll be golden.