Valve Taking Stabs at Microsoft’s DLC Policies?

The latest bit of DLC for Left 4 Dead 2 – The Sacrifice – has gone live for both Xbox 360 and PC. It’s pretty cool in that you get to play as the crew from the first in Valve’s series of zombie-killing games On the PC, it’s free. One the Xbox 360, however, it costs 560 MSP – the banana bucks equivalent of about $7.

Valve have previously let their beef about Microsoft’s DLC policy be known; they want to give away DLC gratis, while Microsoft insists that DLC comes at a cost. Possibly taking a stab at Microsoft’s pricing strategy, Valve has now made the PC version of the game available for less than the DLC of the Xbox version.

Yeah, that’s right. steam users can now purchase Left 4 Dead 2 through Steam for $6.79 – and that includes all of the DLC for the game released to date. If you had to purchase the same content for the 360 it would end up costing you over $30, with nearly half of that just being DLC. For that money, a PC player could buy a copy of the game (including all the free DLC!) for himself and 3 co-op friends – and still have some change.

Thanks to Microsoft’s inability to make a few concessions with their DLC model, the Xbox 360 versions of Valve’s multiplayer-centric games are vastly inferior to their PC counterparts, which receive regular updates and add-ons without any additional cost.

Valve recently announced Steamworks for the PS3 – a platform whereby they can update their games and supply DLC – which is why (as I’m not a PC gamer) I’ll be purchasing all my future Valve games for that Sony’s less restrictive machine.

Source : Ars Technica

Last Updated: October 8, 2010