Gabe Newell blasts next-generation consoles

[Nom Chompsky]

Valve Software's founder and managing director Gabe Newell is not afraid to speak his mind. When it comes to next-gen development, Newell is none too pleased with the programming environments being created by anyone in the industry. He recently lambasted both Microsoft and Sony for failing to make life easier on next-gen developers. More within...

It's been mentioned several times already that some developers are finding development on next-generation platforms to be more costly, more time consuming and more difficult, but Gabe Newell, Valve Software's founder and managing director, seems to be leading the charge in voicing complaints on the direction the video game industry is headed.

... I spoke to some people at Microsoft, and as I said, I can't point to a single feature in Vista that I care about that solves problems for us. At all. And I had the same conversation with the Xbox 360 guys. It's like Xbox 360 doesn't make my life any better, and in fact, it makes it a lot worse, as you're telling me I can't count on having a hard drive," said Newell.

Newell was equally harsh, if not more so, on Sony for its design of the PS3 architecture and programming environment. "There are incredibly few programmers who can safely write code in the PlayStation 3 environment. And I totally see why Sony wants people to write code that runs on seven SPEs and a central processing unit, because that code is never going to run well anywhere else," he said.

Newell continued, "They're saying, 'Make your code not run on anything but one of our machines, and we're betting that we'll have market share that's so high that everybody will have to write code for our platform, and we'll just starve the air from the other platforms by absorbing everybody's R&D budget and making their code less portable.' I understand why that makes sense from Sony's perspective, but that doesn't solve any problems for software developers such as ourselves."

Read more:http://biz.gamedaily.com/features.asp?article_id=10480&filter=&rp=357

 

[arf9999]

At least Sony has a reason...M$ problems are just stupidity.

 

[Nickste]

Go gabe you sexy thing!!!

 

[nrg_wp]

*nrg_wp dusts off his 8bit nintendo clone from the 80's and sighs*

 

[gkm]

Gabe released Steam on the world, so I do not think he can point fingers at anybody else.

 

[bb_matt]

Yep - it is rich coming from him, purveyor of an online delivery system that to this day gives me ****.

"Hmmm, let me play a quick game of HL2 offline - click on ZoneAlarm lock, start steam, asks if it wants to go in offline mode - yes - start HL2 and 50% of the time "this game is not ready to be played in offline mode" - exit steam, go back online, start steam again, wait 5 to 15 minutes till it connects and verifies - now too late to play a quick game "

 

[eye_suc]

hehehe, there are some cracks to enable true offline enjoyment from your legally bought valve/steam games. you install the game, run steam once and then disable it forever (if you so wish). valve can go stuff themselves...

yeah, the next gen consoles are luring everybody away from pc's, while it would be a lot more profitable to be able to easily port the games between different platforms. wouldnt it also make them more money if they could sell their stuff to everybody? or is Sony like the fat kid hiding all his sweets?

 

[rsd]

I kinda like steam.

*hides*

It has always worked well for me.

 

[Nickste]

If I had a sick pipe like those punks in pretty much every other country, except Sa - then Steam might be ok.

 

[martin]

Gabe released Steam on the world, so I do not think he can point fingers at anybody else.

Well said sir!

 

[mZbZ]

Blame telkom not valve

 

[gkm]

Blame telkom not valve

As far as I know the people all over the world are complaining. So, in this case I think I shall just blame both.