President of Gearbox questions Valves lack of PS3 support.

[ZenfoldorVGI]

Procrastinato said:

ZenfoldorVGI said:

Procrastinato said:
Wut?

I like Valve. L4D rocks. I play it all the time.

PS3 also rocks, and is not hard to develop for. Why they talk trash about it is a mystery. Could be that they are just dumb%^$es, from a tech perspective, and their egos don't allow them to admit it, or opinionated fanboys (which is kinda the same thing). That or moneyhatting... lots of possibilities. I can't think of a "good" reason though. Not one.

I think the PS3 IS hard to develop for. Even the Gearbox guy said that. He said it was a challenge, and fun.

I would present most multiplats over the past few years, as proof, and several over the past few months, along with the fact that the PS3 has honestly much better hardware than the 360, but has rarely been able to put out equal multiplats, much less superior.

Or are you implying that every developer has, by coincidence, been lazy and sloth when developer their PS3 versions of their multiplats, and that the PS3 is as simple to develop for as the notoriously easy to develop for 360 and PC platforms?

Of course it's more difficult to develop for. Developers have finally developed toolsets and learned the console enough so they can develop well on the console, but it certainly wasn't as easy to develop for as the 360, a few years ago when that knowledge didn't exist.

"More difficult" is relative.  Don't make me explain that, man.

It just isn't that hard for a skilled engineer who can read SDK docs.  PS3 ports used to be cruddy because it was EASY to port games to the PS3, as long as you took a quality hit.  Thus publishers paid for the cheap port, and PS3 gamers suffered, because publishers believed they could get more bang/buck for a quickie.

The reason devs have made shoddy ports to the PS3 is because they weren't given the money to port the game -- which would have also hurt the 360 version, had it not been the lead SKU on so many crossplat games.  Devs are not EVER lazy.  Even Valve's engineers, who, btw, are not Gabe Newell.  Trust me on this one.

I agree. However I also believe that if the PS3's architecture were as easy to program for as the 360, then they wouldn't have needed lots of money and time to craft the standard ports.

Sure, Valve COULD develop equal ports on the PS3, but for it to be optimized for the console, it would take extra time and extra money for them to achieve the desired retults.

If you know anything about how involved, time consuming, and maticulious Valve is about their major games(with the apparent exception of L4D2, which seems like an uncharacteristicly quick and hastily built expansion pack), then you'd know why they might not think it was worth the extra months per game to build, imo.

When you're already rich, and you're already famous, and you have nothing to prove, and all you want to do is create the next epic game, is it worth putting that off for 6 months to make an extra 1 percent meaningless profit margin on an old game, and develop a port using developers who are so good, it is damn criminal to waste their time on redundancy?

That's why it's not worth it, imo.