hile Episode 2 should have been released last holiday, alas, it was delayed. Shocker. With Orange Box hitting in a little over than a month, we got some time at GC to chat with Valve’s head honcho Gabe Newell about the Orange Box, as well as Episode Two and Three, Steam, new community features, the PS3, Wii and DX10.
 

Game Informer: So how are things going with the development of the Orange Box?

Gabe Newell: Good. We ship to retailers on October 9. October 10 at 12:01 we let it go on Steam, and it’ll probably show up at retailers Europe on the 12th.

GI: Are all three of the games pretty much finished?

Newell: Yep.

GI: So you’re just bug testing, and everything is in its final phase?

Newell: Yes.

GI: When you were going through the whole planning out the game and considering this to be a trilogy, did you have the Orange Box in mind, or was that something that came into focus later?

Newell: No, that was sort of opportunistic when we were looking at how schedules were marrying up. It seemed that clear that these three projects were converging on similar schedules so we said, “Okay, let’s go ahead.” If we were being customers, it seemed like a really nice package. That’s what drove our thinking behind combining them together into the Orange Box.

GI: So why drop the Black Box for PC owners?

Newell: That was resistance from the retailers. They didn’t want more than one SKU. If we were going to do the one SKU, we were going to do the one where we put everything into it rather than making people buy separate stuff. On Steam, obviously, we have a lot more flexibility in terms on how we package stuff.

GI: Will it be available separately on Steam?

Newell: We’re going to announce specific stuff. But we’re probably going to have a bunch since there are no shelf-space issues on Steam, so we’ll have a bunch of different offerings. All the multiplayer products, all the single player products…So we’ll just try to figure out the most popular ways that people will want to buy it.

GI: So do you think that will change before launch?

Newell: We’re going to give ourselves the option of changing that before launch, yes.

GI: Speaking of shelve space, obviously you have flexibility of virtual shelf space on Steam. But – even since the last time we did an interview – it seems like it has just taken off. Every week there’s a new e-mail saying, “Now you can get this library on Steam.” There are other places to get games, but you seem to be the hot spot. Do you see that expanding even more?

Newell: I think that the issue there is how to be useful and how to provide tools to software developers and software publishers and whoever does the best job of that. I think that there’s this sort of false sense that all you need to do is move bits over a wire and you’ve created a good solution. But I think that things should be able to be tracked. One of the things we did for one of the publishers was we helped them find out they had a really bad grey-market problem, and that products that were being sent to one area were getting sent to one area were getting relocated to a different area. That’s about having a much clearer picture into the behavior of what customers are doing. They were shipping stuff into China and it was coming back straight into the U.S. and showing up on eBay.

Steam becomes a lot more valuable to people when you’re building that kind of facility. They have 24-7 real-time visibility into what’s working from a sales perspective. So for example, just for our own products, we do the Day of Defeat free weekends and we can see that not only are we driving more sales on Steam, but we see a spike of sales at retail. As soon as the weekend is over, we can see that that same exact customer goes and buys a retail copy that sort of thing gets the game developers really excited about having this information that they haven’t had before. I think it’s that kind of facility that’s going to determine who will be successful providers of these kinds of platforms.

GI: How much do you think this will expand in the next year? Do you think it will double?

Newell: Yes, I wouldn’t be surprised. We’ve got all of the pieces in place. I think that for the next year one of the things we’re going to focus on is starting the community support and provide more value to gamers themselves. We’ve done a lot of useful work for game developers and publishers. Now gamers themselves are in need of some attention. Starting with community efforts we have a bunch of functionality that’s going to make Steam more valuable to have running on your PC.