Valve Chooses to Avoid Challenge of PS3 Development

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Valve, the developers of the Half-Life series and Left 4 Dead, never intended to become PS3 developers. Despite going on a limb and admitting to possibly reevaluate PlayStation 3 development, it looks like the PC developers are again showing even more disdain for the PS3’s architecture.

According to Tom Leonard:

“The PC and the 360 are just more straightforward. We can focus on what we want to do, which is make game experiences, instead of sweating bullets over obscure architectural decisions [Sony] make[s] 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.”

Alright Valve, we can understand when a developer finds the PlayStation 3’s architecture too difficult and costly to develop for, but when your reasoning for not developing for the PS3 is that you want to “give people experiences that made them have fun”, are you implying that it is impossible for the PS3 to support a fun game or are you saying that you’re too lazy to make a fun game for the platform?

The latter can be justifiable by putting the blame on developmental costs and time constraints–understandable reasoning–but that is not the same thing as a developer saying they want to “make game experiences” rather than learning to develop for an “obscure” platform. But then again, Valve has been using the same game engine for five years, so they’re probably not in the mood to learn anything new.

[Source]

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