While both installments of Left 4 Dead on Xbox 360 outsold its PC counterpart, Valve boss Gabe Newell has said that Portal 2 on PC fared better than on consoles. It’s somewhat of a surprising statistic, considering it was Valve’s first true multiplatform release, not counting the outsourced EA port of Orange Box.

“Portal 2 did better on the PC than it did on the consoles; Left 4 Dead did better on the consoles than it did on the PC,” Newell told Gamasutra.

“So you know we don’t try to guess, because we’re not sure what value there is to guessing. We’ve never had a situation where we said, “We really, really want to build something that is more popular for the console guys.” Because usually we have a bunch of other higher priority problems we want to solve. So we’re glad that people want to play our games wherever they want to play.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Erik Johnson and Newell take turns discussing the open culture at Valve — emphasizing that the company works on projects for fun, rather than listen to market analysis.

“So for us, you could come up with a really compelling business plan or a market analysis, and nobody in the company would pay any attention to you at all. But if you said, “If we do this, then we can work with Michael Abrash”, then a whole bunch of people would say, “Done! That’s it, we have a plan now.”

Newell also took a hit at publishers that compromise design by factoring money into the initial stages of game development, calling premature monetization the “root of all evil.”

“So the primary focus for us at this point is not worrying about monetization, and it’s instead worrying about getting the game right. So we started with a group of IceFrog’s testers that he’s worked with for all the different versions, and sort of got it to a point where we’d stopped making them crazy with all of the dumb things that we had done,” said Newell.

He added, “But our focus is really much on building something that’s cool, and then we’ll worry about monetization. So we’re not going to worry about that until later. Premature monetization is the root of all evil.”

Read the full interview over on Gamasutra.

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