I'm going to go with lazy. Simply put. Because everyone has seen what can be done with the ps3 and FPS...CoD4, Killzone2, the new Uncharted to be released...I mean plz...Valve has always put out OK products in my eyes...but their dynamics and physics in their FPS's I've never seen as downright impressive.

Most innovatives technologies are the most criticized.
The cell cpu is very innovative. what is this kind of coder wich dont wanna learn new paradigm?go change Job!They seem very noob at valve, i understand why their games are crappy!

They just want to make games. Sure, the PS3 Cell architecture is very impressive. The learning curve for that is time that they want to spend polishing the game. I think Valve's focus on the game is noble.

I've always enjoyed the Half Life series very much.

Posts 1 and 2 are clearly from people who have never attempted to develop a game ever, let alone have it running on a PS3.

The PS3 architecture may be innovative, but it is also a complete pain in the arse. The 360 is just as powerful (arguably more powerful in real-world situations rather than benchmarking nonsense) and has a much more straighforward architecture - unified memory, fast CPU, and a decent GPU.

I'm not saying every developer should abandon the platform, but I respect Valve's decision; they would rather focus their development budget on creating games for platforms they know well - the 360 and PC - and that are easy to develop for. There is nothing wrong with that (unless you're a PS3 fanboy) and it's not lazy. Other developers (particularly ones working with large publishers) need to support the PS3 in order to maximize return on their development investment, but it does take a significant amount of engineering resource to get a 360 game running well on a PS3. I'm sure that if the PS3 had outsold the 360 by 10-to-1 Valve would have been forced to change their view, but that isn't the case.

One thing I can say, though, is that no developer works on the PS3 by choice. It's always because they have to (either Sony exclusive or a cross-platform title) and I have never heard a single engineer say, "wow, this PS3 is a joy to work with", because it isn't.

Valve will get left behind in the industry. That for sure.

I mean the future will bring even more complex CPU/GPU's with more than 3 measly cores/6 threads.

What will Valve do then, go hide under a rock.

Of course Gabe's comments have nothing to do AT ALL with him being a former Microsoft employee, one who made millions whilst employed there. Nope, nothing to do with that at all.

I don't understand why people are getting so worked up over this. It's Valve's decision as a company to stick with 360/PC for now. In the future they may change their minds, who knows? Who cares?

If you dislike Valve so much for making this decision (not sure why that would be), don't buy their games. If you only have a PS3, you won't be able to buy their games. So what?

At the end of the day, it's a business decision that the directors of Valve have made. If it turns out to be their demise a few years down the road, so be it. If not, then also so be it.

It's the games that count, not the platform they're on.

valve has long refused to even fix the games on the platforms for which they make them! it's really no surprise they wouldn't want to develop for something even more complex (though better) than a pc/xbox. try running any orngebox engine titles in vista, crash crash crash! none of my games from any other company crash in vista. the fact of the matter is that they don't want to rewrite their precious, but very long in the tooth, hl2 engine, and that is why their games are broken on modern OSes and they won't develop for new machines.

I have run ALL my Valve games first with Vista and now with Windows 7 and NO CRASHES.
It's quite obvious you know very little about computers.

No problems playing any orange box titles on my old vista machine or my Windows 7 RC. Sounds like the poster needs to learn how to tweak his machine. Fact of the matter is consoles suck for FPS, nothing compares to the mighty pc. Unless of course you don't have the knowledge or patience to learn how to use a pc.

I have coded on both the 360 and the PS3, as well as other hardware, and while I agree that it is more difficult to code for the PS3 it isn't so hard you shouldn't do it at all! Valve is a great company, makes wonderful games, and is really holding a grudge against Sony. That is all this is about, PERIOD. They certainly have a loyalty to MS, and a valid gripe about PS3's unique arch, but lets be real here, far less coders than Valve have done very well on Sony's hardware. Lazy, yeah, biased, obviously.

Valve, you are punishing your fans who own Sony hardware by depriving them of the enjoyment of great games. So I guess your grudge against Sony is more important to you than your fans with Sony hardware. Too bad, really.

Jack, Valve is possibly the ONLY developer who actually DOES "fix" their games. EA and Infinity Ward haven't touched CoD4 in like a year, and Valve is still releasing patches for COUNTERSTIKE 1.6 FOR FUCK'S SAKE.

Grow up and smell the reality.

This is political, its not that hard to develop for the PS3, at the begining nobody knew what to do with it, but there is enough info out there now of the best way to use it.

I prefer the 360 as a product, but the PS3 is nice to lead on now

chortle chortle chortle

When are you people going to understand that the people saying that the PS3 is a bigger effort to work on aren't fanboys, but actually people that have experience of the PS3 being a bit of an arse to work on???

Would this even be an issue if they were just sticking on PC like the did for a long while? The only reason the stuff gets onto 360 is because it take little effort to convert and brings in a lot more money. PS3 would be a much larger task and may not bring in enough pennies to offset that effort.

First of, I am a Sony fan boy ;-), and just can’t stay away.

Developing for the PS3 is harder than for the xbox360 I don’t really understand how anyone could say anything else, especially if you only have experience of PC development.

But saying that the PS3 is extremely hard to develop for; just because you have no prior knowledge of this kind of hardware is not correct. If you have experience of the PS2 it’s not that big of a deal.

Errr, what?

The overall concept is vaguely similar (a crap core CPU with smaller additional processors that have their own far-too-small chunk of memory attached), but having PS2 experience doesn't set you up for a happy ride on PS3. The things are very different beasts; in retrospect, the PS2 was a joy to develop for (and I never thought I'd hear myself say that!!)

And nobody is saying that the PS3 is *impossible* to develop for, it just takes extra development effort (which means more people and more cost) and for some developers that cost increase isn't justified, as BC said.

Valve arent't saying they *can't* develop on PS3, they're just saying they don't want to. And I don't blame them.

I really believe that the saying something that is easy isn't worth while count more so here.

Valve arn't being very focused to the future by this announcement. If they take this time now to learn the tech then we could see games like uncharted and killzone from steam. I see it as a unwillingness to learn the tech not a practical one.

Yes it is difficult but so is everything when you try it first, people didn't start running, riding bikes, learning to read and write it takes practice. excluding a entire console in this generation of gaming because you had ONE go at making something and found it to be difficult is arrogant.

What does Steam have to do with the PS3? Or visa versa? I'm not following.

Look at the Trine website. On their developer interview, they did say that it only took them a few weeks to port their game engine to PS3. If Valve isn't willing to spend a few months porting their outdated, unstable engine to PS3, I think it might have something to do with the engine, not the PS3. Now that the PS3 Slim has come out, it is going to be much more popular. Valve has definetely made a mistake.

You can't really compare Trine to Half-Life 2.

I was part of a software development company that wrote software for the Atari ST. It had a straighforward 32 bit OS and a GEM desktop. It was relatively easy to write for but the IBM AT had just been released and we could see that it would be a lucrative market for some of our applications. The programmers refused to work on the PC claiming it was a KLUDGED together piece of trash. Applications on the ST ran so fast that they exceeded the specs of the connected accessories. For example we had an application that would, as PART of it's operation, compress data and save it to the HD. This resulted in a net increase in storage space on the HD and a faster read write. The same type application on the PC would run slower on the PC resulting in a slower read/write to the HD.

The point is that another company released software similar to ours when the 386 was released and made millions. Hindsight

In the PS3, the CELL processor is ment to be part of the graphics processing. Writing software for the PS3 IS harder as you are reinventing the wheel for much of the graphics. The PC and XBOX make graphics simpler with many of the routines already included in the GPU.

I would guess that the PS3 was designed with S3D in mind (at least the hardware). The CELL is faster at graphics calculations than the graphics chips available when the XBOX and PS3 were designed. IT makes sense to allow the Cell to do what it does best. This makes the PS3 harder to write for but better at graphics.

The comments about the PS2 were in part about the PS2 graphics chip as it had a unheard of 2000 bit wide buss. This so that it would support 1080I. The chips in use at that time could not process data very fast but increasing the width of the bus effectively increased thruput speed.