Erik Johnson

Today marked the arrival of the Crash Course campaign, the latest DLC for zombie shooter Left 4 Dead, and some light fact checking led me to conclude that Valve has just created an Xbox 360 version of the game so that it could kick something in the nuts.

It’s certainly not the company’s fault that Xbox 360 owners have to pay 560 MS Points ($7) while the PC version–as always–has to pay none. The console decision was squarely on Microsoft, but matters weren’t helped early this morning when the content arrived on the Xbox Live Marketplace for an incorrect price of 800 MS Points ($10). The content was pulled but not before some mistakenly purchased the add-on for $3 more.

The content, which typically arrives around 2 AM Pacific on Xbox Live, ended up being several hours late and even then the issues weren’t completely fixed.

The PC (see: original, main, more important) version of the game got off to a much better start today. The content released for free on Steam and ‘to celebrate’ Valve is offering a short sale of 50% off the already lower than standard price of $30. Thanks to several price cuts to the PC version over the last year 50% off means the game runs only $15 through the rest of the week.

That means someone who downloads the Crash Course DLC on an Xbox 360 will be paying nearly half of what a person with a computer would spend for the entire game and every piece of DLC released including Crash Course; plus an SDK, a superior multiplayer interface and many other current features that simply don’t exist on the console version.

Valve consistently shows great strategy with the PC (their) side of things. Unfortunately they’ve just as consistently dissed their own console efforts through broken releases, infrequent updating and/or just flat out giving up and ignoring them.

Note: Author owns both PC and Xbox 360 versions of L4D.