It feels like only yesterday that Gabe Newell stood as a major critic of the Sony PlayStation 3, citing his displeasure with the difficult nature of PS3 development. If anything, that’s what made Valve’s E3 2010 Portal 2 announcement all the more surprising. After all, aside from a very low quality version of The Orange Box, ported to the PS3 by EA, Sony users had pretty much gotten the shaft from Valve. But now that the proverbial cake that is Portal 2 for the PS3 not a lie, Valve themselves have claimed that the PS3 version will be the best console version, thanks to added Steam support not present in the Xbox 360 version. But the goodies don’t end there, as it seems Valve is intent on breaking the standard conventions of the video game industry.
In addition to cross-platform play with the Mac OS X and Windows versions of the game, which, in and of itself, is already an amazing feature, PS3 users will be able to link the PlayStation Network and Steam accounts together. Doing so will not only allow PS3 users to access their Steam account and link up with their Steam friends in-game, but also gives them access to the Mac and PC versions of Portal 2 at no added cost. That’s right. PS3 Portal 2 owners get the game for three separate platforms for the price of one. It seems Valve has made the choice of which version of the game to buy that much easier for PS3 owners.
Portal 2 hits store shelves on April 18, 2011 in North America, with Australian and European versions hitting stores on April 21 and 22, respectively.
[via RipTen]