Tag Archives: orange box

Valve has announced that it will start publishing a weekly list of the best-selling titles on Steam.

Bout time.

Updates will arrive every Sunday, and you can see the very first one below.

Steam Weekly Top Sellers – WE May 31

1. Team Fortress 2
2. Killing Floor
3. Left 4 Dead
4. Counter Strike: Source
5. Plants vs Zombies
6. The Orange Box
7. Unreal Deal Pack
8. Unreal Tournament Black
9. Assassin’s Creed: Director’s Cut
10. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Update: There another video after the break showing a virtual can of soda with Ocelot’s face stamped on it. Thanks, mart.

The back of the latest Famitsu appears to have thrown up a serious hint that the new Kojima project is a Metal Gear title.

Watch the video after the break. It shows a webcam pointed at the magazine bringing up a cardboard box topped with an orange exclamation mark.

Remember: rumour. It may well be fake.

E fucking 3, baby. Thanks, Shatner.

More »

Valve’s put out life-time retail sales figures for the past decade, as reported by Gamasutra.

The numbers were published in the latest issue of Game Informer in the US, and only include retail sales – there are no Steam stats in here.

All the info below. This should give a clear indication of why Valve probably isn’t so worried about paying the mortgage.

• Half-Life – 9.3 million
• Half-Life: Opposing Force – 1.1 million
• Half-Life: Blue Shift – 800,000
• Half-Life 2 – 6.5 million
• Half-Life 2: Episode One – 1.4 million
• The Orange Box – 3 million
• Counter-Strike – 4.2 million
• Counter-Strike: Condition Zero – 2.9 million
• Counter-Strike: Source – 2.1 million
• Counter-Strike (Xbox) – 1.5 million
• Left 4 Dead (projected) – 3.6 – 3.9 million

Combined retail sales – 32.8 million (36.4 – 36.7 million if the Left 4 Dead projection’s included)

According to this 1UP piece, Valve’s confirmed that free content already added to the PC version of Team Fortress 2 – and confirmed for release for the 360 SKU – won’t make it to the PS3 game. Snip:

“We don’t have PlayStation developers,” Lombardi told us. Earlier in the interview, Newell discussed how Electronic Arts had handled the PS3 port of Orange Box rather than Valve internally. When asked whether or not EA would support the game by helping port the downloadable content over, Newell said, “They’re not doing ongoing development on The Orange Box for the PS3.”

More through the link.

Valve boss Gabe Newell can say what he likes. So when he says there’s an “oranger box” in the works, that is definitely won’t include Counter-Strike 2 and that Episode 3 will include plenty of stuff that’s never been done before, you can kind of assume it’s true.

On the subject of Episode 3, Newell said, “From our point of view, there’s enough newness in there that we want to spring it on people and say, ‘Here’s a bunch of things you’ve never seen before,’ and have multiples of those. There’s stuff that visually hasn’t been in games before. There’s certainly a number of game elements, on the order of Portal, that have never been done before.”

“We’re really happy with how the Orange Box did, and we’ll do an Oranger Box next time,” he added. When asked if the new package will contain Counter-Strike 2, Newell simply said, “No.”

No date, obviously, was given for either the Oranger Box or Episode 3.

According to this, the Orange Box is to be split up and sold as separate bits in the US from April 9. We knew this was going to happen. We have no idea when – of if – it’s going to happen in Europe because it’s 6.30am and EA is in bed. We’ll drop them a mail later today.

According to this, Valve’s Doug Lombardi has confirmed that console versions of the Orange Box have sold over 1.5 million copies to date, with PC sales of the multi-game title coming in as “significantly stronger”.

“I think the Xbox 360 version did just over a million, while the PS3 [released later in December] version did a few hundred thousand copies,” he said. “So I think when all is said and done, The Orange Box will have sold about 1.5 million copies on the console, which is great. But the game’s PC sales were much stronger… at least a two-digit percentage increase over the console sales. And that includes Steam sales, retail sales, and now individual sales of Portal, Team Fortress 2, and Half-Life 2: Episode 2. So when you take the PC numbers for The Orange Box a la carte, they’re significantly higher.”

GDC was a busy time for Valve, having seemingly confirmed Portal 2, explained why Left 4 Dead won’t be coming to PS3 and hinted that Wii development may be a possibility.

According to this, EA is planning to split out the Orange Box’s games for separate PC release. The company revealed the plans in an investor call following the release of third quarter financials. Valve’s shooter collection – which contains all Half-Life 2 related episodes, Portal and TF2 – will apparently be split up in this way before the end of the comany’s financial year in April. The products are already avalailable separately through Steam.

Missed this the first time round. That Eurogamer chat with Valve shows that the recently released maps for the PC version of Team Fortress 2 will also be made available for the console versions, as well as confirming there’s more Portal on the way.