Valve Explains Why it Doesn't Make PS3 Games

[tayb]

[citation][nom]ta152h[/nom]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.[/citation]

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.

 

[eklipz330]

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

 

[Kami3k]

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.

 

[cruiseoveride]

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

What?

 

[captaincharisma]

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

 

[Guest]

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.

 

[randomizer]

[citation][nom]duckmanx88[/nom]not counting L4D2 right?[/citation]
That decision was rational, just not popular. Making more money is always a rational decision.

[citation][nom]shoota[/nom]I was just gonna say that, it makes it darn hard to read with all these typos, get it together Tom's.[/citation]
I went through the whole thing and didn't even pick them up. I must automatically be filling in the blanks :lol:

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.

 

[ViPr]

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?

 

[iiraymoii]

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!

 

[lordfakie]

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.

 

[duckmanx88]

[citation][nom]randomizer[/nom]That decision was rational, just not popular. Making more money is always a rational decision.[/citation]

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

 

[randomizer]

[citation][nom]duckmanx88[/nom]until we get items like madden where tiny improvements(like a roster, weather effects) could be updated through the previous game.[/citation]
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.

 

[furries]

I am sure they could have worded that statement better. Avoid unnecessary rage and as long as they keep supporting hardcore gamers as well as they have I'm not one to complain.

 

[TheFace]

[citation][nom]ViPr[/nom]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?[/citation]

You're dreaming, and I hope sarcastic. OpenCL was only ratified recently, there is no way that Sony could have made the PS3 programming language OpenCL 2+ years ago.

IMO Sony effed this up by making things hard on the developers (hard to program for), and hard on the consumers ($$$). These are the two parties that matter most: The people who make your content, and the people who buy your machine. Solve one problem and the other starts to go away on it's own. I'm not saying that the other consoles are an example of excellence, but the 360 had (has) TONS of problems and gets away with it b/c of content, and the flexibility in price.

 

[seatrotter]

Wasn't it reported before (either here or another site) that PS3 was intentionally made to be too complex so that the hardware won't be maxed-out too quickly (or something like that). I'm not sure who in Sony made that statement, but that, for me, says it all.

 

[Kami3k]

The main reason why the PS3 is difficult to program for is the dam Cell CPU. It's unlike any CPU used in a PC or xbox(which is a mini PC anyway.)

I also heard that the Cell CPU is pretty much a dead end and isn't being used by IBM that much any more. Anyone have any details on that?

 

[anamaniac]

[citation][nom]crockdaddy[/nom]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.[/citation]

Win.
Business is business.

Valve is here to make money first and foremost.
They may legitamately want to provide great games, but without the motivation of profit, the company wouldn't likely last long.

 

[Zingam]

""The PC and the 360 are just more straightforward," said Tom Leonard, Software Developer at Valve Software. "We can focus on what we want to do, which is make game experiences, instead of sweating bullets over obscure architectural decisions they make with their platform. [...] 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.""

- And that's why you've created that boring and frustrating piece of crap called HL2? Even Portal is much better although it is more like a tech demo than a game!

Don't know about L4D but while Half-life was a pretty perfect game \until the Xen part which sucked so much\ and I enjoyed it so much. HL2 was nothing but a totally frustrating experience for me. Just another overhyped game!

 

[1pp1k10k4m1]

I love Valve games, but it sounds more like "we don't have the technical expertise so we outsourced the one we did release" and that hasn't changed so "we still don't make them". Patrick Soderlund (from EA, one of the world's leaders in gaming) just said they feel like they've gone as far as the 360 can go and developers are getting used to PS3 programming. While Valve is basically through word and action saying "we can't do it, we aren't moving forward".

Does anyone think that as consoles and technology in general have fewer cores? Does anyone think that we were going to stay on the same general x86 architectures forever? Does anyone think that programming new things wasn't going to involve a learning curve and was going to be immediately easier?

Sorry, Valve is supposed to be a leading game developer, if they plan on staying that way they better learn to change and adapt. And that has nothing to do with PS3 or XBOX 360, or PS9 or 10 or XBOX 7, or whatever the future holds. New things are going to come along, if you aren't willing to learn them, you aren't going to always be on top. Like I said, as much as I have enjoyed their games, starting with half life, it sounds like they are really positioning themselves poorly with that "view" (sounds more like an excuse to me). The last thing Microsoft did to be "easy to work with" failed...it was called HD-DVD. Sticking with easy may not be the way to go for Valve on this one.

 

[1pp1k10k4m1]

I also partially agree with zingam about half life 2. It definitely was fun, but definitely lacked in some areas.