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loves2splooge on 10 November 2009
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heruamon said:
Reasonable said:
heruamon said:
@ Reasonable....

I agree with 100% of your post. Wrt to Valve's comments on the PS3...I think they are uncalled for, but one thing I will point out is the continuing nagging that Valve has to deal with on why they don't support the PS3. NO OTHER developer has faced this much heat...There have been muliple PS3 developers who have made statements like this: "This game could only be made on the PS3,”...so while there's no mention of the 360 or Wii, the statements are cheered by Sony fans as YEAH...it's the power of the Cell and BRD...heck, they even plugged it in the Metal Gear. It seems like all of Pitchford's pandering to PS3 fans didn't work...sales numbers rarely lie.

Yeah, Valve have faced a real grilling, plus the strange outbursts from Gearbox, which I think has made them efensive over their position.  I think Gabe made some unfortunate comments early on, reagrding how the architecture of PS3 was nothing but a pain for him and Valve (which I can understand to an extent, as Valve are sitting on a PC centric engine).  Since then, and particularly as PS3 install base has grown, the question of 'why not?' has grown in urgency with media.

I think they should simply say our engine doesn't support PS3 well enough, we have no plans to spend the money to correct that right now, nor do we have the desire, our primary focus is PC with 360 as an profitable side line, and that's the end of it.

Without a doubt...the gaming industry is a wasteland at this point...look at nearly every publishers reporting a loss...some very massive like EA today, and Activision-Blizzard being one of the few exceptions (for whatever reason).  I think it's absolutely crazy to have Valve invest tons of resources into a platform that will not deliver a higher ROI then they are already getting from the PC/360.  Sure, they might make money, but the question is one of ROI...You fully understand this, at least based on your posting history, but so many others on this site don't.  If Valve makes $0.25 on every dollar invested in the PC/360...and they would only get $0.15 on extending to the PS3...what sense does it make to invest limited resouces to expand to that system?  Why not just make 2 PC/360 games a year and get better return on your dollar? 

Thing is, we don't know how much extra it's going to cost them to develop for three platforms at once (PC,360,PS3). We do know that a delayed port is going to be more expensive than porting code over through a simultaneous planned release. Even if a PS3 version sells a lot less, your ROI can STILL increase with a triple plat release IF the cost of porting to the PS3 is cheap enough. I'll illustrate a hypothetical example of what I mean...

Let's say Company A develops Game X for PC (Steam), 360 and PS3.

Let's say it costs them say $10m to develop for PC/360 and $2m extra to develop for PC/360/PS3 (assuming that it's going to be cheap to simultaneously release on the PS3. Say only 20% more cost in this example).

Let's say the PC/360 versions gives them $40m revenue. And the PS3 version gives them $10m revenue (so PC/360 revenue beat PS3 revenues at a 4:1 ratio).

The ROI for PC/360 would be a ratio of 4:1. The ROI for porting the code to PS3 also would be 5:1 (despite the fact that the PS3 version sold a lot less).

In this kind of scenario, triple plat development would be worth your while.

What we do know though is that PC to 360 porting is cheaper than PS3 porting. By porting the PC code to 360, it's easy easy money for Valve. Definitely increases their ROI even after EA takes a huge chunk of the pie. If it didn't increase their ROI to do 360 releases, I'm sure Valve would be happy to stay Steam exclusive after all.