Valve Has Ex-Naughty Dog Employees On Their Side; PS3 Woes No More? [UPDATE]
After years of Valve’s Gabe Newell bad-mouthing the PlayStation 3 for it complexity, even going as far as calling it a “total disaster”, some members of Valve have recently spoken up about their PS3 ambitions, saying “before we do anything on the PS3 we need to be able to support it in the right way”.
More recently, Valve apologized to PS3 owners admitting they “didn’t put their best foot forward with the PS3 community”, adding “we want to give PS3 owners the best possible PS3 experience”.
What better way to give PS3 owners such an experience than by tapping into the talent of one developer that surely has a firm grasp at what it takes to make a great PS3 game. That developer is Naughty Dog, creators of the award-winning Uncharted franchise.
While perusing the profiles of Valve employees on LinkedIn, you’ll notice that a few of them are ex-employees of Naughty Dog. Two of these profiles show ex-Naughty Dog employees with direct experience working on the PS3. Though, I’ll be quick to point out that these employees have been working at Valve for as many as 3 years now.
Vitaliy Genkin, an ex-senior programmer for Naughty Dog, reveals his work creating an ” in-game-editor with PS3 run-time support” along with ” different tools for defining / processing / optimizing in-game data”.
Another profile, for Alex Vlachos lists his work on Uncharted: Drakes Fortune.
That’s not the only ex-Naughty Dog employees Valve has brought under their wing. Elan Ruskin worked with Naughty Dog on the Jak and Daxter series.
With Valve having scooped up some serious PS3 programming talent, they should have no issues ridding themselves of the stigma that Valve just can’t handle the PS3.
[UPDATE] To clarify, we never claimed this is something that just happened. As blatantly stated within each LinkedIn profile, these employees were hired by Valve years ago. We were only stating that previous Naughty Dog employees are now working at Valve. We also speculated that this could mean Valve should have an easier time with the PS3 architecture. Nothing more.
Many sources following up on this article made it seem as though Valve was intentionally “stealing” Naughty Dog employees. That is not at all the case.
I’d like to apologize sincerely to Naughty Dog for running this story. I never expected my words to be twisted they way they have been.
Thanks to Kendrick for the tip!
18 Responses to “Valve Has Ex-Naughty Dog Employees On Their Side; PS3 Woes No More? [UPDATE]”
Portal 2 here we come!
Well when M$ gets support from Sony to bring the 360 forward by allowing them to use some PPC code developed jointly with IBM it seems odd, how difficult would it have been to program for the 360 if that code had not been obtained… When you consider that the OS for the 360 is Window based then you see why it is easier to code for. But then when you see the outcome in the graphics you wonder how they are still in the game…
Sony has a better platform to develop on and ND proved that with the Uncharted series. Its like the old comparisons between MAC and PC, the MAC was a superior hardware platform but PC was cheaper and sold more because of that fact. Speaking of which the 360 is just a dedicated MAC game machine when you look at the hardware specs and compare them to PowerMac G4/5 desktops…
So with the growth in PS3 sales they are eating crow and bending over backwards to get something out to make more money since they have wrung out all the possibility with the 360…
Wait a minute, don’t infinity ward count as a company with experiance making games for the PS3 becasue that would mean Valve could easily hire Jason West and Vince Zampella onto this PS3 team their making.
I’d like to see it just for the look of Kodick’s face when he realise who their working for over Activision.
Let’s just hope that the ex-ND people drag Valve up to their level, rather than Valve drag them down…
@Timewarp
No its not the same since Infinity Ward used the Xbox as their primary console. So hiring West and Zampella is completely different then hiring Naughty Dog employees.
I would rather hire Naughty Dog employes than Infinity Ward employees any day
Valve is a good company actually but they left us PS3 users out in the cold., I have been a fan since way back in the original Half Life days. I own everything they ever released up to half life 2 episode 2. I even have a 4 digit steam account number to show how far back Valve and I go.
I have since moved onto PS3 for gaming needs and when I heard the smack talk about developing for PS3 , It kinda felt like a kick in the ass. Like they didn’t even want to bother, laziness.. I was really depressed with the Orange Box release also, Even though I have all 3 games on the PC I wanted them for my new shiny console but the bugs that PS3 version had were ridiculous. They also hurt my feelings by releasing the Left 4 Dead series on 360 and PC only. I hope they can win me back because I miss the fun times I had with all their games…
I am keeping my fingers crossed at this time.
I’m not saying hire those two employees over the ND ones obviously if Jason West and someone from ND are going head to head for a job then the guy from ND is getting the job I’m just saying it’s always a possibility, also anyone who’s ever made a PS3 game is better at games develepment then a valve employee.
Great image! I’ll give valve more credit when they show they’ve redeemed themselves.
I don’t care for Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft! But I love all great developers
they make the kickass games I love to play!
[...] [via Playstationlife] [...]
I feel sorry for those guys working for Jabba the Hutt (Gabe Newell). Doesn´t meter to me if they have some Dogs on the house now. I want to hear from the horse mouth that he is sorry for the things he said about the PS3, not some Valve PR Bufallo diarrhea.
Until that, Valve won´t see a dime of my money nor my support.
Just another example of a company that put out a lousy port for PS3 owners, which could have been forgiven, but then the big a-hole in charge had to open his huge mouth and say a load of crap about the PS3, which isn’t forgivable. Some underling saying that they “didn’t put their best foot forward” hardly counts as any type of apology, and it certainly doesn’t make up for what the founder of the company said.
There are just so many great games out these days that I barely have the time or money to play the best of the best. I really couldn’t care less what Valve is doing. Lemme guess, an FPS? Yawn.
look for a l4d collection that includes both l4d and l4d2 and all the dlc on one blu-ray disc in the future.
I think that every game on the planet should have multi platform accept the ones made by that company, but sadly their not. so thts why i have a PC, Xbox 360, and PS3. I don’t have to worry about exclusivity. PS3 has the processing power to run Half Life 2, portal, and team fortress 2 at the same time, so why would he have a hole lot of crap to say about it. He has nothing on PS3, but 360 is easier to program for. So its a balance. It should be on all consoles. So in my opinion, there should be 1 console, and thats PC/MAC. If that were the case, we wont have fan boys talking shit about other consoles when they know damn well they have both, or the other. Xbox 360 has its problems but PS3 fails to. I cant eve look at youtube on it without it locking up or play Midnight Club LA online without Freezing.
did Valve have any other choice?? We all know that no one on their team prior to hiring the ex-Naughty Dog employees was smart enough to be able to develop for the PS3. They made that clear when they chose to insult the PS3 rather than just admitting they couldn’t do it to begin with. Usually people only insult what they don’t understand…
hello …
humm, now i can also put a valve in my PS3, for now it’s mostly for the steamy site on my PC
cheers!
To be fair, they joined Valve between August and October IN 2006!!!!
If anything was to come of this “news” we would have heard of it by now.
[...] investigation, however, reveals that the staff hires occurred in 2006 – even before the release of Naughty Dog’s masterpiece – Uncharted: Drake’s [...]