Hopping on the “I hate Sony” bandwagon this week, Valve’s head-honcho Gabe Newell went on a tirade against the PS3 in a GameInformer interview. And I quote:
“The PS3 is a total disaster on so many levels, I think It’s really clear that Sony lost track of what customers and what developers wanted… I’d say, even at this late date, they should just cancel it and do a ‘do over’. Just say, ‘This was a horrible disaster and we’re sorry and we’re going to stop selling this and stop trying to convince people to develop for it.'”
Whew, those are some harsh words, Newell. There is just no more Playstation love these days. And this hasn’t been the first time this has happened, either. Last week, id’s John Carmack told GameInformer that he has disliked Sony’s subpar dev tools since the PS2.
Late last year, gaming’s resident dinosaur Nolan Bushnell sounded off similar sentiments, telling the press that Sony will inevitably lose the crown this generation because of its arrogance towards the dev community.
Sony cannot get a break. PS3’s are sitting all by themselves across the country, HD-DVD is currently surpassing Blu-Ray , and the PSP saw a huge drop off in American software sales for 2006.
Is there any good news left for Sony? With publicity like this, will Sony be forced to finally change their negligent practices, or are they still adamant that the PS3 is God’s gift to gaming?
Those are some _seriously_ harsh words. To the point of making me want to defend the PS3. I think it may turn out poorly for Sony, and I’m certainly not its target market – so I’m not likely to buy one anytime soon, but from everything I’ve heard it isn’t a bad system. As far as the dev tools, they run linux on it, don’t they? It seems like it wouldn’t be that hard to set up an environment using very standard dev tools that compile for the powerPC – sony just needed to offer drivers and graphics libraries for their specific hardware…although those could be the things that Carmack is complaining about. A poorly-thought out graphics library can be hell to use. Anyone on this site have some insight into how dev for a console is different from dev on a PC, and how close to reality my assumptions are?
Valve is gambling on a total Sony implosion. Otherwise I predict Gabe Newell gets raped by a tentacle monster while Sony executives wave Yen in order for Valve to ever be allowed to develop games for the PS3. Now that’s a bizzare mental image I made for myself I hope I can forget.
I still can’t hate Newell, not after all the goodness Valve has given me. Yes, they are very harsh words, but they don’t surprise me, considering the man has made his gaming success on PC, and made his initial fortune with Microsoft, and is of a traditional school of engineers who utterly hates the in-order processing of the Cell chip. There’s just not that much reason for him to like Sony right now, and I don’t think that will change as long as they continue to have such great PC success (and especially if they can get some of their multiplayer games on Xbox Live)