And of course Sony execs said this difficulty was on purpose.

So Sony hates Valve?

is there going to be an article about Valve explaining multi core gaming or are those pictures shown at the bottom of this article just a tease?

'The PlayStation 3 port was outsourced as part of a decision made publisher Electronic Arts.'

'Left 4 Dead, the next retail game Valve, ...'

Learn2Type

I was just gonna say that, it makes it darn hard to read with all these typos, get it together Tom's.

Sounds to me like they are too lazy

Ouch.

Valve: 1
PS3: 0

"I didn’t come into this business in the 90s because of some technical fetish. I came in because I wanted to give people experiences that made them have fun."

He totally just B**chslapped sony if I am not mistaken.

PS3 got owned.

I don't see it as laziness, I think Valve explained the reasons why they don't mess with the Playstation 3 very clearly.

I believe it's perhaps a consequence of Sony's programming architecture not following industry standards.

So they are not lazy because they think SONY's console is not conventional enough for them to invest in the time to make a game for said platform? In other words, "we are not willing to learn new development techniques, we hate change I want to do things how Ive been doing them for years". If Valve are so adamant about providing people with fun experiences...learn the damn PLATFORM! Making excuses because Microsoft have you in their pocket is cowardly.

It's because it doesn't make economic sense for them to invest time and effort into the PS3 when those same development hours can do much more on the XBox and PC. Even testing is more of a pain on the PS3 since it takes alot longer to burn blu rays for your testers to play than just burning DVDs or loading things off a network as the 360 dev kits now allow for.

actually...he just proved that the 360 and the pc are an idiots paradise.you see how does that make valve look when naughty dog/ very small company. i think before devs had more of a accomplished feel beacause they understood the hardware. developers like valve encourage other devs to just skip sonys paltform because they dont understand it...geeze.thats a slap in ms face

Sounds like a good time to learn the ins and outs of the PS3. Then put your services up for porting whatever games a company might want to pay you for.

true, but your forgetting that naughty dog is a second-party to sony, so they likely have much closer ties to sony than a third-party would

Sony seems to not care about making half-decent development tools, the ps2 had the same problem (but it was the ps2, developers were willing to ignore it then because of the ride from ps1) and the really strange setup of the cell makes it more annoying

Does the ps3 have power? Yes, quite a lot, but that comes at the cost of making it a very hard time on the programmers to get the most out of it, even camarak said the same a long while ago

Stupid Sony fanbois comments. Valve has made a decision as to how to best use its limited resources. IF they truly thought a Sony version would yield a large amount of $$ in return for their investment without impacting product quality I would be willing to think Valve would commit. Valve is just making a rational business decision for itself good or bad.

Indeed. Valve is one of the few companies that makes rational decisions anymore. I would rather have a great game on 2 platforms than a mediocre game on 3.

"I think that we've maxed out the 360 but we haven't maxed out the PS3."


That can be taken out of context. There two ways you can take that statement. 1. both platforms perform equally right now, one is maxed while the other has headroom. 2.One is outperforming the other running at peak performance but the one lagging has the headroom to catch up. In reality Id say 2 makes more sense. The ps3 doesn't perform as well as the 360, the anti aliasing is terrible, and the colors look washed in comparison. Im tired of buying games on the ps3 and being disappointed. If it weren't for the controller Id probably buy all the dual platform games on 360.

I am a senior developer and I can say from experience that Valve is just making excuses to cover their true objective (make lots of money). Everything has a learning curve. Some languages are better than others at some things and not at others. Writing code in HTML is damn easy. It is also very weak when compared to php or java. The PS3 has more power than the 360, the difficulty in accessing that power is a offset by the benifit it provides. If a company is truely looking to make cutting edge projects then they will overcome the learning curve and utilize the additional logic processing.

If you are simply trying to make a quick buck then you will take the easy path and code for what is tried and true for you. The risk in learning the PS3 development could pay big dividends if they were willing to take it, but it could also hurt your company if you fail. Most businesses are out to make money with tried and true. Very few are willing to push the envelope. This sounds to me like a they are simply saying we are happy milking the 360 and PC for money and we are not willing to take a risk for the possibility of making better games. I am not saying they would necessaryly make better games on the PS3, but the possibility is there and they are simply not attempting to do it because of the risk their deveopers and management will fail. I personally believe it is worth taking the risk for a possible big return, but I also don't have a problem with playing the lottery now and then.

Thats good, because the Need for Speed games on 360 are much smoother than PS3. Maybe now EA can squeeze enough out of the PS3 to make the same game run as good as its 360 conterpart.

What people say about you means little; only what you say about yourself is really important.

Valve basically said they have weak programmers. As a programmer for many years, I'd NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER admit something was too difficult for me to learn. No programmer worth his salt would. I'd never admit I couldn't learn a new architecture and learn it well. It's called pride, and this man is absolutely shameless.

It would be like a boxer admitting he didn't want to fight someone, for fear of losing. Or a baseball player asking his coach to take him out of the game, because the opposing pitcher threw too hard and he couldn't hit him. This guy is absolutely shameful. Even if it's true, did he really have to admit it, and make people sick? He could say how difficult the PS3 was if they did write programs for it. Then he could say that as someone that conquered it, not out of weakness because his developers were overmatched. Ugggh. Disgusting. I don't know any programmers who would be so shameless. I don't get it.

not counting L4D2 right?

No, that is not what Valve said. Valve did not say they had weak programmers they said they have no interest in spending the millions of dollars it would take to hire a programming team or train current programmers on a system that is difficult to learn. I have no doubt in my mind that the team who created Half Life 2 and more could program a game for the Playstation architecture Valve simply isn't interested in spending the money learning to do it just as PLENTY of game developers don't have OS X dev teams to develop their games on OS X as well as Windows. It is a cost decision, not a talent decision.

Programmers don't get to speak for the company.

Arite so basically, sony is gonna have an interview with some site soon saying "We wanted the PS3 to be difficult to program so it gets better content"

...O wait they did
i still think Valve knows they fuckin' pwn

It's just not worth it for valve to have a dev special dev team just for the PS3. At least with Xbox and PC those dev teams can be one and the same for the most part.

Oh and ta152h, I suggest you actually read the article and even the article were sony admits that the PS3 is difficult to program for. So why should a company train or hire a dev team just for a console when it probably won't even sell that much to begin with? Even PS3's biggest title sold only 4 million, MGS4, pathetic.

"... because I wanted to give people experiences that made them have fun"

What?

LOL not that pathetic when half the crashbox fanboys kept whining about how metal gear isn't on it

Wow what a bunch of lazy bums. I love the oppurtunity to go deep into the silicon and optimize every instruction out of the processor I'm using.

That decision was rational, just not popular. Making more money is always a rational decision.



I went through the whole thing and didn't even pick them up. I must automatically be filling in the blanks

I think this is a pretty poor effort on Valve's part as well, at least from a consumer POV. From a business standpoint it's obviously a good move, otherwise they wouldn't have made it.

wait, aren't PS3 programs supposed to be written in OpenCL, which is the language that all future programs are supposed to be written in, and which makes the code multi-platform, or am i dreaming?

I guess I struck a lot of nerves within the PS3 hater crowd. Valve admits it themselves that they do not want to learn the code because of its complexity, Valve sounds like a wimp spewing those words. I like Valve a lot but, I can not support a company who will not support all because of a cowardly reason. At least say you are an exclusive developer and move on, because wimping out and saying "its too hard!" is ridiculous!

Their name says it all, "Valve" when the PC and Xbox valves are open the PS3 valves are closed, so thats why they can't use a PS3 with that engine they have.

until we get items like madden where tiny improvements(like a roster, weather effects) could be updated through the previous game.

You're thinking "I want more for my money" and Valve are thinking "We want more money." Both are "rational" from the viewpoint of each side. Businesses aren't interested in giving out freebies unless a significant ROI can be achieved, greater than that which can be achieved by "screwing" the customer.