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Forums - Sony - Valve shuts out "Too Complicated" PS3

monlosez on 10 June 2009
The Anarchyz said:
Alby_da_Wolf said:
Reasonable said:
Alby_da_Wolf said:
Whether it's an excuse or not, Sony should simply release dev tools that totally void additional complexity as an acceptable excuse.

I don't think it's really the dev kits.  In the end Valve are sitting on their own, self developed engine platform, Source.  They release all their titles on it and upgrade it over time, so that while it does look older now its overall feature set remains impressive and from a PC point of view it will play very well, and with good graphics, on ridiculously low end PCs.

Source is easy to stick on 360.  Source is not easy to put on PS3 and would need changed to work well on it.  It's as simple as that.  It wasn't anything deliberate, well, maybe 360 design being easy for PC developers was deliberate I guess... whatver, for Valve 360 is an easy source of revenue (sorry for the pun) that takes minimal additional effort.

Look at the EA port of Source, etc. for The Orange Box - it's okayish but by no means great, and remember this is an engine that would normally run well on PC's with far less power than a PS3, and with more processes, etc. running to boot.  Clearly, Source would need a major overhaul to work really well on PS3, and clearly Valve don't want to make that effort.

If Valve do support PS3 I suspect it will be further down the road during an engine overhaul, when it would make more sense to ensure the engine could support PS3.  Mind you, they might just ignore the PS3 completely right through the gen.

Would I prefer them to support PS3?  Sure, but then I'm not big on exclusives unless true 1st party.  But it is their choice in the end and their business.

 

Well, Valve's position seems quite, er, reasonable , put this way. But just in case they feel tempted to port their engine to PS3 too, possibly, as you suggested, on the occasion of a major update, Sony providing easier tools could furtherly push them in the desired direction. As PS3 user base grows with time, becoming more appealing, and dev tools are improved too, what's not appealing now for Valve could become so in future. The part about easier porting from PC to XB360, though, suggested me another thing: basically XB360 has a tri-core PPC CPU and a Radeon GPU, so, as Wii has a single-core PPC CPU and a Radeon GPU, shouldn't be PC to Wii porting as much easy (as long as some features, mostly graphics, are trimmed to be at the reach of Wii's less powerful HW)?

This is interesting, every game that is released on the PS3 or 360 needs to support 480i and 480p, this mode is the Wii's standard, so having PC as lead, and 360 as first port the Wii translation should not be complicated, the Broadway and the Xenon have similar PPC architecture (only downscaled) same for the Hollywood and the Xenos, both are Radeon, their hard work is only on the controller and adjusting power (this should be piece of cake since the HD mode is the one that takes the real power here and they only need to work in the SD mode)...

I think when you port to Wii you have to downgrade every graphic content to run without slow down on Wii's GPU.



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Squilliam on 10 June 2009
The Anarchyz said:
Alby_da_Wolf said:

Well, Valve's position seems quite, er, reasonable , put this way. But just in case they feel tempted to port their engine to PS3 too, possibly, as you suggested, on the occasion of a major update, Sony providing easier tools could furtherly push them in the desired direction. As PS3 user base grows with time, becoming more appealing, and dev tools are improved too, what's not appealing now for Valve could become so in future. The part about easier porting from PC to XB360, though, suggested me another thing: basically XB360 has a tri-core PPC CPU and a Radeon GPU, so, as Wii has a single-core PPC CPU and a Radeon GPU, shouldn't be PC to Wii porting as much easy (as long as some features, mostly graphics, are trimmed to be at the reach of Wii's less powerful HW)?

This is interesting, every game that is released on the PS3 or 360 needs to support 480i and 480p, this mode is the Wii's standard, so having PC as lead, and 360 as first port the Wii translation should not be complicated, the Broadway and the Xenon have similar PPC architecture (only downscaled) same for the Hollywood and the Xenos, both are Radeon, their hard work is only on the controller and adjusting power (this should be piece of cake since the HD mode is the one that takes the real power here and they only need to work in the SD mode)...

But in this case the TEV is nothing like the PC GPU architecture so it does take some work. Im not sure how difficult it is to make it work properly but I doubt that its easy like in the case where people simply recompile a PC game for the Xbox 360 and get a working copy up in a matter of hours.



Tease.

The Anarchyz on 10 June 2009
Squilliam said:
The Anarchyz said:
Alby_da_Wolf said:

Well, Valve's position seems quite, er, reasonable , put this way. But just in case they feel tempted to port their engine to PS3 too, possibly, as you suggested, on the occasion of a major update, Sony providing easier tools could furtherly push them in the desired direction. As PS3 user base grows with time, becoming more appealing, and dev tools are improved too, what's not appealing now for Valve could become so in future. The part about easier porting from PC to XB360, though, suggested me another thing: basically XB360 has a tri-core PPC CPU and a Radeon GPU, so, as Wii has a single-core PPC CPU and a Radeon GPU, shouldn't be PC to Wii porting as much easy (as long as some features, mostly graphics, are trimmed to be at the reach of Wii's less powerful HW)?

This is interesting, every game that is released on the PS3 or 360 needs to support 480i and 480p, this mode is the Wii's standard, so having PC as lead, and 360 as first port the Wii translation should not be complicated, the Broadway and the Xenon have similar PPC architecture (only downscaled) same for the Hollywood and the Xenos, both are Radeon, their hard work is only on the controller and adjusting power (this should be piece of cake since the HD mode is the one that takes the real power here and they only need to work in the SD mode)...

But in this case the TEV is nothing like the PC GPU architecture so it does take some work. Im not sure how difficult it is to make it work properly but I doubt that its easy like in the case where people simply recompile a PC game for the Xbox 360 and get a working copy up in a matter of hours.

I forgot completely about TEV (same with most 3rd party devs XD XD)...



Ultibankai on 10 June 2009

Wow, people this isn't affecting anyone except Valve. They don't get the profits from releasing on the PS3, yet PS3 owners can still get access to their games through steam on the PC. They are the only ones who really lose in the end.




               

                  

Cypher1980 on 10 June 2009

Hold on isnt this getting out of hand.

1. Valve didnt just throw this out into the ether for no reason. They were pressed into the comment by a game journo who will have hoped for exactly the reaction on these forums. They were essentially just defending their business model.

2. I dont think it is Lazy. Its just commercial common sense. Why should a dev spend more time on one platform to make it as good or better than its competition. Why should they lose money because of the OEM's design choices.

People need to get some perspective.

What about viewing it in terms of

"We would have loved to have developed for the PS3. Unfortunately due to its original CPU choice and memory configuration we have no commercial alternative but to concentrate on our core markets of Direct X capable machines. "



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De85 on 10 June 2009
Ultibankai said:

Wow, people this isn't affecting anyone except Valve. They don't get the profits from releasing on the PS3, yet PS3 owners can still get access to their games through steam on the PC. They are the only ones who really lose in the end.

If PS3 owners buy Valve games on Steam, then Valve will have lost no profits from not porting to the PS3.  They will have simply gotten it through a different channel.  The only lost revenue would be from people who would have bought a Valve game on PS3 if it were available, who would NOT have otherwise aquired it on PC.  I'm guessing (and believe that Valve feels the same way due to the way they are operating) that this group of gamers is small. 

Sure, Valve could port games to please these people and make a little money off of it, but the issue is still return on investment.  Valve believes that they can make MORE money by using the funds/resources that PS3 ports would require on other projects. 



coolestguyever on 10 June 2009
JEDE3 said:
It's ashame... they must be crap devs if they are the only ones having trouble anymore.


Exactly what I was going to say. I thought that arguement/excuse died in 2007 when Modern Warfare, Assassin's Creed, etc. released on PS3 and were as good as the 360 versions. I guess they are the only devs still complaining.



Falcon095 on 11 June 2009
coolestguyever said:
JEDE3 said:
It's ashame... they must be crap devs if they are the only ones having trouble anymore.


Exactly what I was going to say. I thought that arguement/excuse died in 2007 when Modern Warfare, Assassin's Creed, etc. released on PS3 and were as good as the 360 versions. I guess they are the only devs still complaining.

I will repeat this because i'll pretend that you just posted without reading the other posts

1- Valve has as much problems to port their games as other companies, but they decided to not do it. It isn't because they're lazy or because they can't, it's because they don't WANT to do it.

2- Valve is mainly a PC developer so they don't have need to port their games to every console. Porting the games to the X360 is easy so they choose to do it as a bonus.



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BMaker11 on 11 June 2009

One thing I've also noticed was the use of "porting" to the PS3.

I thought ports were cheap, which is why every PS3 exclusive should be put on the 360 (in the minds of 360 fans) to recoup dev costs.

Does this not work the other way around?



MrBubbles on 11 June 2009

things are more expensive to put on the ps3 regardless of whether its a port or not.



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