Valve's Gabe Newell Speaks on Console Development

A user writes "Gabe Newell, of Valve fame, criticizes Microsoft and Sony on how difficult it will be for next-gen developers to produce games on their upcoming hardware. He is especially critical of Sony's model, where code written to run on Cell will be very hard to port to other systems, and vice versa. Will this bring upon a new era of PC Game superiority? Only time will tell. In the meantime, Newell says he believes that Steam-like systems will be extremely helpful for developers on the new consoles due to their ability to provide updates and new content."

In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Gabe was reported saying plyaing his companies games too long could result in a person starting to resemble himself

In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

Gabe Newell, of Valve fame, criticizes Microsoft and Sony on how difficult it will be for next-gen developers to produce games on their upcoming hardware.

In other news, Sony criticizes Gabe Newell and Microsoft how difficult it is to have decent security.

Re:Fear of the new

[Have Blue]

More like "OH NOES! An alternative to my current specialization! It requires adapting and additional investment, therefore I must fear it!"

Re:Game Programmers are weird.

[dkf]

You young whipper-snappers should learn from decades of experience with SIMD processors in the scientific supercomputing community: if you want high-speed parallel code, you use Fortran.

Re:great

[PaganRitual]

I agree with your points, but

"Oh btw, do you also whine and scream about DOS games you cannot play anymore?"

I wouldn't go as far as to say 'whine and scream', but I've been hankering for some Syndicate Wars, Ultima Underworld, Blood and X-Com lately, and either the DOS emulators are still struggling with DOS4GW mode, or the games weren't made for a keyboard with a stupid windows key.

So, in summary, WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGHHHHH I WANT TO PLAY MY OLD DOS GAMES!!!!

Re:Pots and Kettles

[spectecjr]

XNA is not "Xbox/PC"! XNA is Xbox/Windows. It's not Microsoft trying to be cross-platform; quite the opposite! It's Microsoft trying to be proprietary and lock out Linux, Mac, and the other consoles in one fell swoop.

At Gamefest 2005, they said they'd support all consoles with XNA - if other console manufacturers would let them. So no, it's not them trying to be proprietary.

Re:Pots and Kettles

[Kazzahdrane]

Except Gordon never says anything ;)