Half-Life 2, considered one of the most prolific games ever developed, continues to be the benchmark for Valve and how they define success; even the upcoming Portal 2 launch on 4 platforms will be chasing the precedent that Half-Life 2 set, the developer said.
In an interview with GI.biz, business development director Jason Holtman and VP of marketing Doug Lombardi claimed that not even Left 4 Dead has been able to top the 2003 title.
"Everything that we do competes with Half-Life 2," said Lombardi. "That was a huge, huge launch. It was six million or something in the first year, so we're always chasing that one. But yeah, Portal 2's going to be really, really big."
Lombardi did dispute the need to market for each of those platforms individually. Calling the method “old school and tied to the old print mentality,” he argued, “Today, the websites are all multi-platform. If you’re doing television ads, which are where a big, big percentage of where the dollars are going, those are all multi-platform.”
"Of the $25 million that we spent for Left 4 Dead 2, which came out on only two platforms, at least $23 million of it was spent just promoting the brand and the game. Without any thought of it was PC or Xbox."
Valve also insisted that, contrary to persistent rumor, "There's no Linux version [of Steam] that we're working on right now."
1 Comments
August 18, 2010
I hope they try to make better and better games as their focus and not just look at selling more and more copies of shovel-ware. I enjoyed HL2 but I liked HL1 more, maybe HL2 was the better game but DuesEX had raised the bar for me personally. I am hoping for better games that result in large sales vs 25 million dollar marketing campaigns that result in games no where near HL1 or HL2's level of fun and replayibility.