Valve Interview Part 2: Left 4 Dead Demo Potential, the Evolution of Steam, and More
May 23, 2008 11:43am CST
by Nick Breckon
Don't miss part one of our interview with Valve marketing VP Doug Lombardi, in which he talks at length about the PC gaming platform and its many perception issues.
Entering the final minutes of EA's Spring Break event, most demo stations in the room long since abandoned, Valve's bank of Left 4 Dead systems were still at capacity.
Zombies exploding in the background, I pinged Lombardi on a number of Valve-related topics, from Left 4 Dead release plans, to the new Steamworks initiative, to what his company has planned for the future.
Shack: What's the current state of development on Left 4 Dead?
Doug Lombardi: So the game is pretty much playable all the way through right now. And as we've done with most of our games, we get to a point where, it's playable all the way through, there are some [minor] issues that we need to work on, and we try to add more time to the schedule to have as many people as possible play the game, to make sure that it's approachable to players of all skills. We want to make sure that all the game that we've built gets played, not just be like, "Okay, it's complete, let's ship it."
For example, Half-Life 2 was pretty much done in April of 2004, and we spent the rest of that year just looking at pacing, and looking at approachability, and making sure the easy setting was easy enough, etc. So we're in a pretty similar state right now, with it being, what, early May, and we're looking at the same time frame--November--for shipping.
So we're going to be spending a lot of time just bringing it to events like this, taking it to Quakecon and Leipzig, and just getting as many people's hands on it as possible to make sure that it's playing right and that it's fun, and that the group dynamics are showing up and are visible to people.
Shack: It's going to ship simultaneously on the Xbox 360, right?
Doug Lombardi: 360 and PC worldwide in November.
Shack: I heard you might launch it with a free weekend?
Doug Lombardi: We're kicking around a lot of ideas now and nothing's final.
The free weekend has proven to be really, really powerful in terms of promoting sales on Steam, as well as on retail. I think the first one that we did was Day of Defeat back in February of 2006, and it was basically a rip-off of the old cable model. Like HBO used to do it when I was a kid. [laughs] We were like, it'd be cool if we could give somebody a taste of the whole game instead of making a demo, and the Steam guys went off and said, "Okay, we can do this."
And so we tried it with Day of Defeat, and it worked out. We saw this huge sales spike on Steam immediately when it ended, but then also that whole week we saw a spike in retail as well. So we said, okay, we're obviously on to something here. So we've done it with Team Fortress--one of the things we experimented with Team Fortress was doing it regionalized. So we did a Germany-only free weekend, and then recently we did a worldwide one. We're still sort of tinkering with the model and playing with it a little bit, but we'll definitely at some point do a free weekend for Left 4 Dead. It'll be somewhere near the launch. Whether or not it's the first weekend is still sort of to be determined.
Shack: Will there be a demo as well?
Doug Lombardi: I think so, I think so. Whether or not there will be a demo before or after is something we're still talking about. You know, most of the time we've done them afterwards, so we'll see where it falls.
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