Valve to continue with EA

Valve Corporation expects to continue working with Electronic Arts once it's shipped The Orange Box in October.

"Everybody always tells us what a horrible monster EA is supposed to be and we keep waiting for the hair to sprout out and the fangs to grow," Valve MD Gabe Newell jokes in an interview with Eurogamer.

"We've had a great relationship with them so far, and bringing more titles to that like Left 4 Dead seems to be a natural consequence of that."

Asked if he was confident that Left 4 Dead - a Valve collaboration with Turtle Rock - would be published by EA, he said yes.

We also asked Newell if a free launch weekend was a "strong possibility" for Left 4 Dead, after Valve's Chet Faliszek agreed it was a good idea during QuakeCon.

"Absolutely. What we're finding is any time that we remind ourselves that we're in collaboration with the community, we benefit, whether it's guest passes to help introduce new people to our franchises, or free weekends or whatever, it's easily the best way we have of getting people to be excited about the games that we have, so we're going to pull out all the stops with Left 4 Dead," he told us.

"It's definitely a game that requires you to play it - you can describe it until you're blue in the face, but five minutes of playing it is definitely better than watching a 30-second spot on MTV to try to get you to understand why Left 4 Dead is going to be worth your time and money."

For more from Newell, check out our full interview - taking in Orange Box, Steam, Wii, next-gen consoles and all the rest of it - when we publish it on the Internet or something.