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Earlier this week, Valve rolled out A Heavy Update for its madcap multiplayer-only shooter Team Fortress 2. The third class overhaul of its kind, A Heavy Update bestowed achievements and a trio of unlockables for the titular profession: a chaingun named Natascha, punching gloves, and a sandwich. However, like the Medic and Pyro updates--and a myriad of other patches for the game since The Orange Box dropped last October--the add-on was for the PC edition of the game only.
Soon, that will no longer be the case. Valve has confirmed for GameSpot that all content released through A Heavy Update will be available by year's end for the Xbox 360 edition of the game. The Valve representative also noted that there are no updates planned for the PlayStation 3 version, the development of which Valve farmed out to publishing partner EA.
Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the update for the 360 game will be free. Valve managing director and cofounder Gabe Newell addressed this fact, as well as the delay on console patches for TF2, in a recent interview with VideoGaming247.
"On the PC side, we've done as many as four updates in a day, and that's great: we can respond very quickly," Newell said. "Or we can do the Pyro updates, and the Medic updates [and so on]. On the consoles, they want us to charge money for them, because that's in their model, and our model is very much more to grow the community by giving out free updates. That's harder for us. And then on the consoles they have pretty lengthy certification periods, and we're pretty happy that our customers think that we do a good job on the quality side of updates, and we don't need someone looking over our shoulder checking to make sure that we're not going to screw our customers with a bad update."
For more on Team Fortress 2, check out GameSpot's full review of the Xbox 360 edition of The Orange Box.
360 Team Fortress 2 update by year's end - GameSpot News Blog - Gaming News and Videos
