In our biggest interview yet, I was lucky enough to bag myself some time with Valve’s Gabe Newell and ask him eight hard hitting questions. We cover everything from Left 4 Dead to Team Fortress 2. Gabe talks about why he has to charge for DLC, Half-Life 2 Episode 3, Left 4 Dead and a whole bunch more, so I hope you’ll join me after the jump.

Hey, thanks for agreeing to do this with us, it’s really appreciated.

1. Do you plan to release all the Left 4 Dead DLC on the Xbox 360?

Yes, within the constraints of the Xbox 360’s Live program.

2. Will this DLC be free, like it is on the PC? I know that Microsoft insist on charging for DLC, but Criterion have managed to release all their DLC for free with Burnout Paradise, using patches. The same method was used for the Gears of War ‘Annex’ mode, so surely it must be possible?

The 360 has a distinction between Title Updates (TUs) and DLC. TUs are limited to 8 MB of code over the life of the product, and we blow through that pretty quickly with the amount of content that we release. DLC releases have to be two charged for each free release.

On the PC, of course, we release everything for free, which is what we prefer to do for our products and our customers.

3. Can we expect the same kind of DLC for Left 4 Dead that TF2 has received (eg. new weapons), or could we see some new characters as well?

This is driven out of what is most popular with customers. TF 2 has shown us how useful it is to use Steam to figure out what content is played the most and drives up player numbers the most, and we’ll do the same thing for Left 4 Dead.

4. Team Fortress 2 on the 360 was plagued with lag issues at launch, have Valve learned from their mistakes especially with Left 4 Dead being so co-op orientated?

The main source of lag was users with poor network connections running listen servers on their 360. We’re addressing this by running a bunch of dedicated servers ourselves.

5. Was the delay of Left 4 Dead in response to the many big AAA releases coming out so close to Left 4 Dead’s Nov 4 release date, such as Gears of War 2?

No. It’s because we needed more time, and secondarily because it lined up with the 10th anniversary of Half-Life shipping. Our schedules are pretty much exclusively driven by when we get the game to the quality level it needs to be at.

6. Will Left 4 Dead have developer commentaries like The Orange Box had?

Yes. These have proven to be very popular since we started doing them in The Lost Coast.

7. Could you update us on Half-Life 2 Episode 3?

Nope.

8. Following the recent Heavy, Pyro and Medic updates, will all the Team Fortress 2 classes receive updates?

That is the plan.

Much obliged, thanks Gabe.

So there we go. Post your thoughts below in the, you guessed it, commet box.

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