Valve's Gabe Newell on Apple's Gaming Failures

The site Kikizo has up a lengthy interview with Gabe Newell, co-founder of Valve and one of the minds behind the Half-Life 2 games. Though their discussion centers around the Orange Box (slated for release soon) and the titles contained therein, the discussion kicks off with Newell's scathing dress-down of Apple's understanding of the importance of gaming: "We tried to have a conversation with Apple for several years, and they never seemed to... well, we have this pattern with Apple, where we meet with them, people there go 'wow, gaming is incredibly important, we should do something with gaming'. And then we'll say, 'OK, here are three things you could do to make that better', and then they say OK, and then we never see them again. And then a year later, a new group of people show up, who apparently have no idea that the last group of people were there, and never follow though on anything. So, they seem to think that they want to do gaming, but there's never any follow through on any of the things they say they're going to do. That makes it hard to be excited about doing games for their platforms."

Re:The first important thing was:

[Mattintosh]

The new mouse does not "emulate" a right-click. It sends a Button2 (sometimes called "Joy2", for joystick buttons) signal. Ctrl-click (Ctrl-Button1) emulates a Button2 signal in the OS.

Re:The first important thing was:

[Jeff DeMaagd]

The problem is that it does a poor job at having a second button. There should not be a finger anywhere near the Button1 or else the click is treated as Button1 even if the pressure is in the Button2 area. This is due to the fact that they use capacitive proximity sensing rather than pressure sensing. The entire mouse basically has one microswitch.

Re:Yep. No games.

[Blakey Rat]

You're mis-representing his argument. He's not saying "Macs can run games," that's patently ridiculous, seeing as there's so many games on Mac. What he's saying is "Apple doesn't give game companies much support." What's the most Apple's ever done for game companies? They had "Sprockets" for OS 8 and 9, but they never took it seriously-- Bungie did most of the work on it, from my understanding, and Apple mostly just ignored it until by OS X it was completely obsolete.

Apple's historically always been like this, though. Even classic games like Prince of Persia, Uninvited, or even Myst were done with no support or promotion whatsoever from Apple.

Re:The first important thing was:

[Midnight Thunder]

The problem is that it does a poor job at having a second button. There should not be a finger anywhere near the Button1 or else the click is treated as Button1 even if the pressure is in the Button2 area. This is due to the fact that they use capacitive proximity sensing rather than pressure sensing. The entire mouse basically has one microswitch.

This is a problem with Apple's mouse, not with the OS, since the OS can use any old logitech mouse quite happily. This is what I do.

Re:What Apple needs

[Anonymous Coward]

Easily, if you lurk around on sites like slickdeals.net or fatwallet for long enough. For example, this Dell will blow any imac out of the water once you add in a $280 8800GTS http://www.slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?sduid=0&t=584681&highlight=dell [slickdeals.net], for much less money than any mac.

Re:Hey! They got games for Mac too...

[ben there...]

Ah yes, because you can't buy console games at newegg, or any other online retailer for that matter.

Not that it's relevant. What matters is what percentage of sales for PC or consoles is made online. Spare the sarcasm.

And lets be honest, sales from services like Steam and Direct2Drive are rather insignificant compared to that coming from brick and mortar stores, that is if they ever actually released those numbers.

This [play.tm] Google News listed story says 1/3 of software sales are made online. Steam accounts for 3 million gamers [steampowered.com] monthly. There's a bit of obviousness about this question. If you're the type of person that shops for games online, are you more likely a PC gamer or a console gamer? Personally, I've never considered buying console games online. And I haven't bought a PC game in a store in over 5 years. Part of that is the poor selection and high prices in B&M stores. Steam takes that a step further and lets me play while it's downloading.

Not to mention recently you have such time vacuums like World of Warcraft that have been drying up PC gaming dollars that might go elsewhere.

I wouldn't exactly call that "drying up." WoW brings in a lot of casual gamers that wouldn't be interested in most other online PC games.