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Valve's Gabe Newell Speaks on Console Development
DelitaTheFridge 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."
Steam-like systems
You mean the one that forces you to "update" before you can play its game? This system is making a player's life difficult too.
It's worth noting, however, that Valve is historically a PC games developer and has only made two console games thus far--Counter-Strike and Half-Life 2, both for Xbox.
I think this line says it all - Valve is inexperienced in cross-platform console game development, and it's whinging about it. Kind of reminds me of Alternative Browsers Impede Investigations
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
OH NOES! Something new! It is scary and different therefore I must fear it!
They're both IBM-ppc it seems like it would be easier to port next gen than current gen. at least to a non-coder. -j3rry
"Coffee is the lifeblood of champions" -Mike Ditka
I don't think systems like Steam are viable in the long run. They'll be successful for a bit while they manage to force them on us, but in the long run they're just too restrictive. The market is (hopefully) going to reject them.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Will this bring upon a new era of PC Game superiority?
When the day arrives that I can take a brand-new & high-end PC game out of a box, insert it into the CD-ROM and play it immedietally without installation or having to customize 2 dozen settings: Yes. Till then: No.
But what's your response to new content? What's going to happen to things like free levels and, for example, the free ninja gaiden update that was made available. Nope. No more of that. So his point is correct. And honestly, what's wrong with FIXING something? I see no problem with updates. I like getting new maps and new player moddles for FREE from valve. I also like fixing cheat bugs and such that simply cannot be solved once.
Go here for teh [sic] funny.
Gabe was reported saying plyaing his companies games too long could result in a person starting to resemble himself
In other news, Sony criticizes Gabe Newell and Microsoft how difficult it is to have decent security.
Say what you will about Gabe and Valve, he is very correct about both systems. In Microsoft's case, they've made things a pain for developers by having two different models with and without a hard drive.
In the case of the PS3 and Cell, it is different enough in design from "traditional" architecture that cross platform development for it is going to be a nightmare.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
There has to be an understanding that there are going to be game players who cannot access the outside world -- if not because of lack of actual access, because lack of access to the firewall. As the primary admin for my entire family, scattered as they are across the country, I have have them all natted behind a simpleton box -- but none of them has a routable IP address. I'm unlikely to change thos configurations for a game. A steam model which requires constant updates/verification is just not going to ever be "the sims" or any other "best selling game of all time."
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
I bought Doom 3. I bought Half-life, UT 2k, 2k4, DN3D, etc etc ad nauseam. I like FPS games.
I did not buy HL2. Why? Steam.
I might relent when the price is $10. Let's see if the game is still playable by then, given the dependence on an internet connection.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
What makes steam so great? Well to sum things up, distribution just became a whole lot more easy. Valve is one of the most independent game producing companies on the planet, since they are not bound to a publisher (via sierra). How much does steam pay for distribution? I am shure MUCH less than your average game company. In the future I expect to see game companies pull away from publishers, using a torrent-like-systems to distribute their software. Resulting in even more cash flow, and cutting out the middle man.
Linux Video Tutorial Project, Tutoring the masses.
When was that? ;)
But joking aside...personal preference, whether somebody likes games in PC or console style...
Besides, anyone here really believes that creating impressive graphics more easily will bring superior games? (OK, you might argue that more time will be for other things than graphics...but will it be really?)
One that hath name thou can not otter
There's the actual video interview.
I spoke to some people at Microsoft, and as I said, I can't point to a single feature in Vista that I care about that solves problems for us.
I can't see a single feature in Vista that solves any problems I've had with Windows on the consumer's side either.
And I totally see why Sony wants people to write code that runs on seven SPEs and a central processing unit, because that code is never going to run well anywhere else
You can say the same about DirectX. You can never run DirectX on anything but Windows. (WINE doesn't count). This is common practice, it happens with proprietary formats, why wouldn't it happen with game consoles?
"new era of PC superiority"
I doubt that since, just like the consoles, the PC are turning to multicore designs to boost performance.
Developing good multithreaded/parallel code on a closed system like console may be hard, but doing the same thing on a open platform is even harder - your code would have to support any type of multicore PC architecture (tons of possible variation) and traditional CPUs as well.
about Steam?
Steam-like systems will be extremely helpful for developers on the new consoles due to their ability to provide updates and new content.
Isn't it just a glorified download interface?
C17H21NO4
As I see it Both Sony and Microsoft are making huge mistakes with there new consoles..
One of Sony Biggest problems will be all the strings attached to the Blue Ray technology, as well as its reliance on being connected to the internet whenever you want to use it.
Microsoft will have many of the same problems it has had, but surisingly they seem to have more forsight into the the market that Sony does this time.
Personnly I'd like to see both consoles Flop, Especially The Ps3.
At first you probably think he is trying to say that games are harder to produce because you have to succumb to the high graphics and excellent gameplay that gamers expect these days. This article doesn't seem to be leading toward that.
It seems he is trying to come at an angle that most of us don't understand, and that is physically programming the game. When you have to program the game on a kernel level with such propritary equipment, then it becomes hard as you probably have to learn the hardware everytime they come out with a new system. Programmers have to redevelop a whole entire style of code to the newest system that comes out. If this is true, and putting this up against the PC; then you see that the PC pretty much stays a lot of the same in a kernel type environment. Plus the fact that everything seems to work together and act the same. Of course, I have no idea how to write a video game and most of us don't. But he probably has a lot more insight on what is going on in a kernel software development tyep environment for all the new systems.
Consider this before forming opinions.
Not to be blunt or anything, but getting good performance out of any distributed system is always overly complicated; this will be equally true of multicore PC systems as it is of new console systems. Let's face the facts, few game developers have really had to consider critical sections and racing conditions on the level they're now forced to face them; this means that most developers are simply not up to the challenge and will produce some technically inferior games.
Now, there will essentially be two classes of games in the next generation; the graphically impressive and technically superior games and the games which are only a slight improvement over what we've seen on either the Gamecube or the XBox.
Valve's comments don't really matter that much, because producing games for the PC will be several times as complicated as it ever was before. If you started producing a brand new game today you would have to consider low, mid and high level single core as well as low, mid and high level multi-core systems; not an easy choice considering the single core systems will potentially perform much worse with distributed algorithms whereas the multi-core systems will perform dramatically worse on a single threaded system.
At least the developers will not be given the necessary time to tweak their code on the PC until after the game is released (Just what I always loved, buggy games).
Apparently the solution to consoles being difficult to program for is to use Valve's proprietary, slightly sucky, extremely annoying Steam content delivery service. I don't get how that works, sorry. And I'm a console developer working on next gen.
To meet some of the other points he's raised doesn't take too much effort either:
Apparently nothing in Vista helps him out at all? What a shame. I fail to see how that is particularly relevant, especially since it really doesn't make anything worse. XNA might change things for Valve, but that's not the same thing. Valve only target one OS. If that OS changes under them, perhaps they should have practiced cross-platform development to cover that eventuality...
I'm not really surprised he says Xbox 360 makes his life worse - a lot of the planned online functionality MS have in store renders Steam somewhat irrelevant.
And I think he's being a touch cynical about the reasons for Sony's Cell architecture (disclaimer - I work for Sony). But I suppose he could be correct. Again, though, there are techniques for cross-platform development which Valve hasn't bothered its ass using.
If you stick with writing games for x86 Windows, I don't feel much sympathy for teething troubles when you start hitting the console hardware. Mainly because (shock) it really isn't all that different for the majority of the coders! Yes, you'll need specialists. But huge chunks of stuff won't need to change at all - game logic, frontend, scripts/scripting. This isn't rocket science, and many companies have been releasing titles near-simultaneously on multiple, drastically different hardware platforms for years.
Sour grapes from a Win32 codeshop. Who'd believe it...
Game dev and music blog
Gabe Newell - the guy who's company has chosen to make their games NOT portable to any thing other than Windows, is criticizing Sony for making their games hard to port?
The same Gabe Newell who took a relatively portable game framework (Quake) and made it NOT portable (Half-Life)?
The same Gabe Newell who chose to use a non-portable graphics framework (Direct-3D) rather than a portable graphics framework (OpenGL) for Half-Life II?
Well, I guess he is an expert in non-portable - we'll allow his testimony.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Will this bring upon a new era of PC Game superiority?
God, this is a sad attempt to revive a tired flamefest.
The answer is no, for two reasons.
First, the PC and the console are two different beasts. The different peripherals and capabilities of each system tend to lend them to different types of games. My favorite PC games have not hit the console, and visa versa.
Second, console games sell a lot more copies (partly due to the greater Joe Sixpack appeal from easier setups and partly because it's a pain in the ass to pirate games on modern consoles, so you don't see two-thirds of the games out there being pirated, as you do on the computer). A lack of compatibility would probably not be a really good thing for the PC, given that there are more development dollars in console games (actually, a lack of compatibility almost always screws over the end user and benefits only the system vendors).
In the silver lining department, this is probably a good thing for Linux -- the large and current commercial game library on Windows is one of its greatest strengths in the college crowd, and whatever college students use is what everyone uses in a couple years.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Shut the fuck up you peecee clown.
5 _326.html
The reaction in the console world to has been hilarious. Some guy who used to work at Microsoft and hitches his company completely to that technological nightmare that is Visual Studio/DirectX/Windows/x86 is crying over the fact that he is now screwed technologically in his ability to compete in the lucrative console market.
Well boo-fucking-hoo Gabe.
You made your choice and no you have to live with it. Just like you made your, idiotic, choice to use Outlook...
Those of us with a fucking clue who actually work in the console biz have been working our way to the promised land for years now. And with the PS3 we have arrived. You guys haven't seen anything yet with what we are doing and will be doing with the PS3/Cell/RSX hardware. It is a game/graphics programmers dream system.
Not only is the PS3 a dream system, the unlimited scalability of the internal bus architecture of Cell chips means our code bases are ready to scale to unbelievable heights of performance in future media devices that use multi-Cell systems or Cell chips with more SPUs.
So, yeah, it must suck to be stuck in x86 directx land.
BTW, all you crazy Linux cats are going to get to have fun with your very own Cell systems soon:
http://kerneltraffic.org/kernel-traffic/kt2005090
Enjoy! I know I am...
Good, will this relieve the slump we've seen in good PC games?
From TFA:
Newell was equally harsh, if not more so, on Sony for its design of the PS3 architecture and programming environment. "There are incredibly few programmers who can safely write code in the PlayStation 3 environment. And I totally see why Sony wants people to write code that runs on seven SPEs and a central processing unit, because that code is never going to run well anywhere else," he said.
What he seems to not understand/want to pretend isn't the case is the fact that the architecture of the Cell is a reflection of longstanding trends in computer architecture, not an exotic thing that Sony dreamed up to be troublesome.
In particular, there has been a longstanding disconnect between the growth in the amount of memory bandwidth available to chips versus the amount of computation that can be done on them. Computational capacity is growing much more quickly than memory access. Over enough years, this disconnect makes a big difference! Nowadways, processor architects will tell you that computation is basically free while communication is what is expensive.
Architectures ranging from GPUs to multicore CPUs to Cell take advantage of these trends in various ways, deliving much more computational capacity than standard CPUs. All of these architectures are deeply inherently parallel. There just isn't any other viable way to take advantage of all of this computation.
John Owens has a nice chapter in GPU Gems 2 on this topic.
If Newell (or whoever) doesn't want to program the SPEs on the Cell, he's free to just use the PPC CPU on it. And his game will be much slower than someone who uses it well. But there aren't going to be very many performance gains in the future to be had from single-threaded code running on CPUs. So while Cell is not trivial to program, none of the other choices are any easier. (Note that there are C/C++ compilers for the SPE instruction set, etc, so they're not *that* hard to program.)
(I'd like to hope that Newell actually knows all this and is just posturing in he middle of his Steam pimping and that this doesn't reflect reality in Valve's world!)
-matt
Steamy pile of...
What happens if you want to play it 15 years later?
I can still play Ultima Underworld (the original). Will you be able to say the same about HL2?
Great game btw, UU.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Maybe I'm just too impressed with Cell's architecture to see things clearly, but here's my opinion...
Generation after generation, developers have been given ever more powerful processors with a corresponding extra cost in hardware. Some of this is really needed to overcome architectural limitations (register renaming to make up for the scarcity of registers in x86 comes to mind) -- indeed I think x86 is too crippled to perform well without lots of hardware assistance.
But the fact is that we've hit a wall of performance. Power increases due to ever more complex chips, plus certain effects like leakage currents (that were disregarded in previous manufacturing processes) are becoming ever more problematic. So the free performance lunch is over, and CPU designers are having to trim the fat of their designs. The result is nice power-efficient architectures like the Pentium M, but there's only so much that power-conscious design can do if you still must have the complexity of out-of-order execution and other modern CPU features.
So there's really no way around. If you need a power-efficient processor, you're going to have to resort to completely new architectural ideas, like extensive use of SIMD and multi-core as Cell does. Programmers are going to pay a price in terms of complexity and cost of software development, yes; but there's no other way, the growth of CPUs we're used to is flattening out, unfortunately, and can only grow again through adoption of these alternative programming models.
Which is why I say these people are spoiled brats. If CPU designers are guilty of anything, it's feeding off this illusion that infinite growth without laying any burdens on programmers was possible. But complaining is no good now; either they're going to adapt or die. It's clear that no ordinary out-of-order design, using the same transistor budget, can reach the peak power of Cell if correctly programmed. So if these guys really want the extra power to make better games, they'll have to learn these new programming models and bear the burden of extra complexity.
Join the NFSNET. Our prime goal is making little numbers out of big ones. http://www.nfsnet.org/
The PS3 architecture is quite odd...
Its a fact that, n parallel processors is less efficient than one n-times-faster processor. And Sony does have some quite none standard C++ extensions compared to microsofts use of OpenMP.
I always thought because the XBox used DirectX support, it made it easier to port games to and from PCs (using Windows).
Is that changing in XBox360? or has there always been high discrepancies between XBox's DirectX and Window's DirectX?
And what does Nintendo do that makes it easier for them to port (noting that he didn't criticize them). I'm pretty sure Nintendo uses their own proprietary graphics engine too. Speaking of that, HAS ANY GAME CONSOLE ever made it easy to port games to and from their console?
HD Trailers
Is it just me, or do game programmers seem to be the only group of coders who get away with flaunting their apparent inability to write portable, flexible code?
Word is they couldn't even get Half-Life 1 to run on Macs because there was too much platform-specific code. I'd assume the same issue occurred in HL2 (there was an Xbox "port", but that's really just a repackaging of a windows app). Most other groups of programmers would seriously love to have the opportunity to write code for neat new hyper-parallel chip designs. The entire game industry apparently can't figure out how to make sound and video run in separate threads, something which should seriously be an over-the-weekend kind of change.
I really don't mean to belittle the entire game development community, but I really don't get it. The entire computing industry is moving toward multi-core chips, parallel computing and network-centric storage. Why the hell are game programmers, the ones who are supposed to be pushing computer architectures, living in the early 1990s?
Develop For
Article includes links to the video analysis and a transcript of the next-gen part of the interview.
I don't think a Steam-like system is going to have much luck on consoles, since X-Box Live already exists, unless you count X-Box Live as a Steam-like system.
However, I DO think that Steam and Steam-like systems, properly done, have great potential to break the strangle-hold that the publishers have on the industry. An alternative, low-cost, popular (that is the tough one) distribution system could create a market for smaller developers and games with smaller budgets that won't get picked up by Sierra and EA and won't ever get on store shelves. Everything people hate about today's game industry could be destroyed by good independant distribution.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Being a modem user, I can't stand steam. A night and the next day to get half-life 2 all updated before it would let me play. If I buy the game at the store, I want to be able to pop it in, quickly install, and play it. Better yet, leave out the install and just play.
Oh, and I can't forget, if I want to play counter-strike online and there happens to be a new patch (2-3 hours download) for half-life2 I can't just disconnect and play half-life 2 anymore offline. I have to go download the crappy patch which is forced upon me before i can play half-life 2 again.
What a load a crap. I'm never buying a game that uses steam again.
Unless and until I see 4 people sitting around their 'Media Center' PC with USB controllers playing a 4-player offline game on the TV...
let's just say we should leave the hyperbole to the fanboys...
E = m * c^(Hammer)
The difficult thing to port games to and from the PS3 won't necessarily be due to the multi-core sets or differing GPUs, as OpenGL is common place and multi-cores are becoming standard across PCs and consoles. The difference is that most of the cores in the PS3 are more akin to DSPs rather than full on GPUs: they are designed to crunch floating point math almost exclusively for physics and graphics over AI and network. This is somewhat untested and unproven territory, as shown by Apple's refusal of design adoption. This sort of design is unique and hard to translate to any other architecture and can provide gains for those who code to it, and difficulties to those who may try to abstract that layer for portability.
"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."
This is to be expected, he has funded the creation of Steam from scratch, of course he is going to sign it's praises and say software like it is the future. The thing that he doesn't have control over is the customers, and they will decide what the future is.
Business Voyeur
There's also a differentiation in the types of games for PCs and consoles. On average, console games are much more geared for the average crowd, then for a techie. I'd really buy a console if I could play "smarter" games like Europa Universalis, Rome Total War or Galactic Civilizations, but I really doubt it's ever gonna happen.
The Raven
I didn't think you had to update it to play the game...Can't you just go into offline mode and play it as it is?
hellboy1975 http://www.foutheye.net
Maybe they should write a Java Virtual Machine for each console and write all of thier programs in Java, then the games would be easly portable, but very very slow.
I don't care a lot about whether the console architectures are easy to port to or from. To me, it seems like it's a sort of embedded device. Usually, for embedded hardware, you're willing to make a portability tradeoff.
What I want to see is readily available development tools for consoles. I want a cheap-or-free compiler, so _anyone_ can get into the console software market. That's the _real_ barrier to development.
With Unreal 3 and Havok already on XBOX360 and PS3, I would be worried about trying to sell Source too.
All I read was:
Blah blah blah, Consoles are hard to develop for, blah blah blah, we can't get our technology to work on them, blah blah blah, buy our product, blah blah blah.
"My cat's breath smells like cat food." - The Tao of Ralph Wiggum.
Halo and Halo 2 were games designed only for X-Box (and later they made a PC varient) that sold wonderfully. Haven't we finally come to a point that it can be proven that a title can be successful if only written for one platform?
Halo and Pikmin are two games that I absolutely love to play, but are only available on one system (XBox and Gamecube respectfully). This idea that you have to have a game play on every platform is the pitfall that we've experienced in special part thanks to EA.
Even today most games are designed to play on the xbox or playstation 2. Nintendo has been making millions of dollars since day one making and endorsing games that are only available on their systems, when are the other consoles going to start to do the same?
If you write a game for portability and not to take advantage of the pros of a system then you'll have the same mundane game across all platforms.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
This is the sort of thing that Nintendo has been criticising for a while. They have actually stated that they would rather make a console that is easy to develop for, than one that has the all the latest bells and whistle.
The only thing that is holding Nintendo back now is the "family oriented" image they have always paraded. It will be interesting to see if Nintendo maintains this approach, or whether they will change this?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
while i can understand things like the CELL architecture making his life more difficult i think its a bit stupid to slam the idea all together because processor architecture has to progress at some point and should be encouraged
what hes saying atm is its bad that sony are using a new and possibly better architecture just because no one else is
I hereby propose a Consumer Petition Button next to every controversial and petitionable /. article.
E.g.
HD-DVD / Blu-Ray - For A Merging of Formats
Sony / Microsoft - For Easier Code Portability
AMD / Intel - For A Free-for-All Mudwrestling Challenge Between Engineers
Nerds, unite!
I think Gabe is pushing for a foothold. He wants to have a game OS and frontend that runs concurrently with the 360 OS. In the world of console real estate, Gabe wants beachfront property so he can have users connect to his VALVE servers, download his proprietary content, and pay subscription fees that are deposited into his bank account. It would extend the console lifespan that MS has established by having a continuous stream of new content available that, after the initial purchase of the 360 and the VALVE client gamedisk, would cut MS out of the revenue stream.
If MS opens this door, where software developers are allowed to run clients and use the 360 (or PS3 for that matter) as a PC emulator, Microsoft will be making a mistake. It would open the door to console mods and new content that can be created by anyone, uploaded from a PC to the main VALVE server and then accessed using the VALVE 360 client for only $59.99.
That beachfront spot boys and girls, is where Gabe wants to pitch his tent.
The reason I didn't buy, or even decided to pirate, or remotely even look in to Half-life 2 was because they lcoked everything down. When I buy a game it's *mine*; when you begin to tell me that the book I just baught is actually rented, I can do without your bullshit. Especially when it's a few large companies who are conspiring against me and everyone else for control over information which they term product and we all know it too.
I can see it now; the cops knocking on your door to ask you for your copy of Ubergame because your lisence has run out and you haven't mailed the copy back within the alloted time period. Don't want to return it? $500 fine and they search your house for it. Cops win, they get pay raises, corps win, they get more money.
That's what Gabe Newall really wants; he's a fucking control freak.
Preach it, brother!
Ad hominem.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Valve is absolutely correct in its assessment. Having to develope for multiple platforms that are enormously different (harddrive/ram only for starters) is a major problem! Look at what Valve has done, game wise... I dont think anyone complains about their games. They have done what they do with a fairly stable platform that hasn't changed dramatically. Microsoft is forcing them to change the way games can work by not providing a consistant platform. It does NOT make life easier for them! Steam, even though it is of a completely different nature, is a godsend to almost everybody in the real gaming industry. Look at halflife2. If people actually learned how to work their firewalls, there would be no problems the app works great. They update content and add new stuff all the time, whats to complain about? Look at farking EA/DICE and battlefield2! No updates, well actually a faulty one that needed to be patched, and now a new addon before they fix the original! Why not complain about the bad guys (EA/DICE for crappy non-supported games, M$ for ruining freedom) and praise the good guys and really listen to them.
Seriously, with rising console and game prices, shrinking pc prices, and broadband expanding, eventually the market will know what many of us have already known for years. Games are better on PC. In fact once wine is cleaned up a little bit, you can have a free game machine with very cheap hardware that will run circles around even the next next gen consoles. The only thing keeping consoles around is the market lock in by game dev companies that want $50 for every disk. I for one waited the extra year to play san andreas on the PC because it was WAY MORE FUN in surround sound with shadows and reflections and in HD format. I doubt I was alone, and as a result the game simply wowed me beyond all expectations.
Forget the console. As PCs get cheaper and cheaper, they WILL die out, it might just take 3 decades or so since the game dev industry is so beholden with getting $50 per game, which is LUDICROUS anyway.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
As much as people bitch about Valve, if they were to suddenly have to close up shop I would bet you any amount of money they'd remove the authorization aspect from steam in a heart beat and allow for independant master servers. Why? Because now they aren't tied to a publisher that holds an iron fisted grip on their IP and code.
Looking at the sales numbers, I've always wondered why PC only dev houses haven't done the occasional console game or made certain their good PC game got a good port.
Lets take Ion Storm, they do a good RPG, Anachronox that's an homage to console RPG's and it never got a console port. Why? Isn't obvious to port that game to an audience that already appreciates such games?
Or Blizzard, which got it's start doing console dev as "Silicon and Synapse" and then abandoned the consoles. They've got a good action RPG, Diablo, which did get ported by an outside company and got reasonalby good review scores They do a sequel and there's no port.
Then along comes a company called Snowblind which does what is essentially Diablo II for the PS2 (Balder's Gate: Dark Alliance) using an awesome engine. (mmmm, water) Does Blizzard take that engine and do a console specific Diablo II port? No. Gamers are clamoring for a sequel to BG:DA, they want more! More levels, more classes, online play. Other action RPG's are announced by other companies licensing the engine. Then we hear that Snowblind has been bought by Sony and 2 years later guess what. Theres a Diablo II clone out for the PS2 using the BGDA engine set in the EQ universe. It has more levels, more classes and yes online multiplayer. 1 year later and there's a sequel to that game. Then at PSP launch there's a Diablo clone using a very similar engine from SOE. And what do we get from Blizzard? They announce a third person shooter set in the Starcraft universe done by an outside company. Which is then delayed and then handed off to another company. Makes me want to pimp-slap Blizzards bosses.
Of course the Company creating steam has no conflict of interest making a statment such as this saying it vital to provide updates and new content. Note to developers: on consoles you cant update a games, it has to ship bug free THANK GOD! I know all us PC gamers are spoiled by 45meg patches on the day of release that sometimes break our old savegames, but those poor console gamers never have to download any patches...and that is why next gen consoles are bad.
Making that complaint is akin to complaining that you cannot buy a Whopper at Mc Donalds. Sony needs its platform to be successful. Why should it accomodate the needs of those looking to write multi-platform code that can only potentially hurt its market share?
Sony must make the PS3 as easy to program for as possible, but that does not at all mean that it should keep its architecture even remotely compatible with competing platforms.
Besides, it may just backfire on Sony. Having done well in one hardware generation is no guarantee of success for the next generation. Being able to leverage its previous successes are important, but people eager to play PS2 games are not going to buy a PS3 to play those games if they already have a PS2 and would rather play X-Box 360 or Revolution titles.
END COMMUNICATION
Personally, I think that suckage scales linearly with annoyance, so if something is "..extremely annoying" it is also extremely sucky ;)
What, me worry?
Bullshit, the whole crappy article is an attempt to push Steam onto other developers.
"A handful of coders can handle PS3"? More bullshit. Code is code, more processors != increased complexity. Any half decent coder would abstract the hardaware away from his game logic/engine anyway, nobody goes around rewriting engines from scratch anymore, the changes are incremental.
I also call bullshit on why development costs are supposed to sky rocket everytime a more powerful computer arrives. They use the same fucking code! 3D models are 3D modules, you can vary the tesselation in the friggin modeling software. Every game in the past has been current generation then scaled DOWN, it's complete lies. All games are under-developed because the hardware can't match the visions...as new hardware comes along they just ramp up the code a bit more so you get better physics, higher details, better textures.
It's just one big blag to justify ever higher prices.
Come on, this is months old. Anyway, Gabe's just being a whiner. He banked on the Source engine lasting as long as the HL engine, and he's well aware that if next-gen consoles take off, Source is going to be obsolete (technologically) faster than you can say "Black Mesa." I think though is making him a bit cranky...
I don't think Valve really has anything to worry about as long as they continue to cater to the mod community, but I do think that Gabe's just whining because he doesn't like consoles.
Blizzard are busy with WoW. It's making so much money for them that even console-league sales probably just aren't worth it for them. Their bosses are doing just fine, by the criteria bosses are judged on.
Plus they've never made a game that didn't need a mouse to play right.
I agree with the WTF to SC:Ghost. Some of the multiplayer modes look pretty interesting, but it seems "meh" otherwise.
steam is the reason i didn't buy half life 2. it went against all my principles and as it turned out (and will), i was right. people couldn't play the game they bought at launch time. lots of people apparently also got banned (even though they paid for the game) without any apparent reason.
that's why they want an online component. the distribution is only half of the reason; the other half is greater control of software, software which you paid for.
the "pirates" are playing half life 2 just fine and also the source ver of counter strike. there are apparently even occuring updates to the infringed versions to keep the game current. and they even get to choose (what a concept) when or if they want to patch the game. a lot of the forced updates are causing many problems. upgrading is not necessarily the utopia it's made out to be, at least not universally true for everyone. there are times when it's best not to upgrade.
as i mentioned before, there is a clause in "EULA" which allows them to terminate your ability to play the game for any reason they choose at any time. this includes your single player capability, since by definition, steam and half life 2 can NOT be seperated. if we have more un-bribed reviewers, they would treat the 2 as it should be: one. it's as part of half life 2 has the physics, textures and control etc.
this allows them an unprecidented amount of control over your purchases. software by any reasonable measure of logic, does not require a license to use though the legal system obviously kowtows to the software industry. your hard earned money buys you the right to use it, why people assume they also need a license is because the software industry has a very good PR and marketing and lawyer dept. they've convinced people throughout the years that they need licenses to survive and then before anyone knew it, it was the standard. but that's a slightly different issue.
imagine in the future, like say 10-15 years... the wet dream of the software industry will come true... per individual DRM which is connected to the internet 24/7. you want to play a game wopr? you'll have to get permission from the copyright holder (not necessarily the author... what a public service). you want to write a term paper at 2 am? the internet connection you have is down? no problem, just flunk. you want to view porn and relieve your manly pressure? the dept of homeland security has deemed porn is anti-american. you're out of luck.
there is no slippery slope, it's just the logical progression of their desire. they couldn't control software in the 70's, 80's and 90's as much as they wanted to. think back to all the corrupt floppy disk schemes. the word lookup copy prevention schemes, the cardboard wheels, etc etc. they just used what they had at the time to prevent people from making use of the rights that copyright grants them. don't say that copyright doesn't grant purchasers the right to use because why else would we give wholesale protection to authors and then expect them to lock up their works? no, it's when a customer buys a copy, that they can use it and this limited monopoly would then fall back, notice the word back, into the public domain.
they have never learned. not from the mess of the 80's nor of the optical disc corruption and driver installed invasive starforce/securom/etc system-distabilizing methods of today. they will never learn. they have only made things much worse for paying customers and have not hindered the infringers any. the only logical progression is if it becomes more invasive and anti-customer in the future. i will make a prediction... it will get much worse in the years to come, not in small part due to newer methods of Insidious Computing and the role of the internet in "securing" products from their real owners.
if they simply wished to use STEAM to distribute half life 2 and other games, i wouldn't have a problem with it. they use it to grip more tightly and take away your existing rights (what's left of them). and to add to the absurdi
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
Whacky though he may be, Steve Ballmer was right on when he did the developers-dance. Their desire to code for your system makes or breaks you.
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
So if a company wanted to release a set of free levels, what's wrong with including that in a separate CD that you can order, get in game magazines, or download and burn (from the company website of course).
The Hard Drive is just the laziest way of providing game content enhancements, and is also the easy way to lay off on QA because you know later you can patch. Really patching is the only thing that becomes really hard without a hard drive.
And what's wrong with fixing something? That means they didn't play through it. If you are going to accept that world than get used to loosing who save games and the like just because they didn't really test it and need an update to make something work that should have worked in the first place.
No software is perfect and not all bugs are going to be eliminated. But you can get rid of 99% of the bugs that are going to affect the players in a way that makes them make up lost ground again.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If it stopped working a day or two after I bought it, then yes I would mind.
So if you bought HL 2 and your internet connection went on the fritz for a few days - wouldn't you have this exact problem?
It's things like that that pop up randomly in life that make requiring a network connection a bad idea. Espceially for entertainment which is supposed to entertain and not annoy.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have to say, I listened to the interview and I anm glad to hear someone speak out their true feelings. I found him to be saying from a developers point that the new consoles arent so hot. Well, I am a consumer and I have to agree for a totally different point of view.
I just dont see that the previous generation of machines lived up to their potential. I mean when they came out we were convinced to believe that they were the best thing from now till the end of time, we were assured of movie like game play and what-not. Well, they are saying the same thing again, and they will say it again in 5 years. Consoles are getting somewhat better graphics, the gameplay is getting worse, and they are getting basic PC functionality that a pentium 90 machine has had for years (chat, mp3 and video playback?!?!)
I have bought EVERY single console and at least 15 games for each one since Atari 2600 (I even own a PSP and a DS). But, for the first time since the 70s, I am not inclined at all to buy these new machines. I dont see them doing anythign that my computer cant already do.
Valve buys Infinium Labs.
I had no interest in the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray camps uniting. Little it seemed to me could be gained, when Blu-Ray looked like the best all-around idea. A format war only hurts the consumer who buys into the wrong side.
I also cannot say I care much for easier portabilitiy of games. If all the consoles are exactly the same to program for, then how do we get truly varied games? The problem of uniqueness is one that can inspire some companies to make really unique games. That's why I'm happy that each of the consoles coming out are so different. The nerds among us should have money enough to be able to afford more than one console if they really like a game elsewhere.
The AMD/Intel war - I'll just stay out of that one thanks!
If there were petitions posted allow people to petition on both sides - for OR against.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You know I get a little bit frustrated when I see people shouting and using words like NEVER too many times in a posting. Look, Steam may have its problems, but as someone who used it everyday for 6 months while making a Source mod, I really don't see the problems that you are talking about. Maybe once a week I would have to wait a few minutes for it to do "something", but other than that, Steam was actually a great way to access all of the dev programs in Source plus test different versions of our game. That and take a CS break now and then. The idea that this is some great intrusion on your privacy or whatever is just ludicrous. The software works: it allows them to automatically update the game, send me news about shit they want me to buy (which sometimes I actually want to), send me news about free shit, and generally sits nicely in my tray, doing absolutely nothing 99% of the time.
c2_bag
Every touts the benefit of having a closed system so that an entire spectrum of games will perform roughly the same for everyone. This is also the biggest downfall, because "everyone" is often a close to 50/50 mix in the case of Xbox/PS2, so you end up having to make two copies of the same game.
I expect now that xbox is even further from its original "pc in a box" inception, it will only increase greater hair pulling at developer studios (and not in a good way).
[cx]
I've never understood why anyone would actually like Steam. Some of the biggest annoyances about Steam have already been pointed out, the requirement for a viable online connection and the requirement to download updates.
I'm not happy about handing over my bandwidth to a service that really doesn't serve me anything. Yippie, it can download patches automatically. I still have to wait for those patches to come through the wire regardless of whether or not I get them via Steam or via File Planet. The only difference being that when I download from a site, I can still play the game (at a minimum, in Single Player mode). Steam doesn't always let me do that, so I end up waiting while Steam downloads a, "necessary," patch.
To add insult to injury, some of the Steam patches have proven to be a joke. I'm surprised how many gamers have very short term memory. Gamers wow at how the patches come in automatically. It seems to me that most gamers don't remember how Valve released a patch through Steam, then had to turn around and recall the patch due to some ridiculous bug that should never had made it past testing. The gist of it is, with Steams ability to apply and remove patches at the whim of the developers, Valve has gotten slack in testing their patches to ensure glaring bugs are squashed.
Now visualize the same situation on the XBox 360 or whatever. You pop in your DVD (or whatever medium you use) and you can't launch a game because someone at Valve screwed up and sent out a patch that didn't work. Yeah, I'm going to be getting rid of that game pretty quick
I bought a PC knowing that I would deal with patches, downtime and other operational gaming hazards. I bought my consoles knowing that all I need to do is pop in a disc, check the battery on my wireless controllers, and destroy a few brain cells while I play. I really have no interest in buying a console when I'm going to be dealing with all the crap that comes with a PC. Might as well hack the console and install Linux if all I'm going to be doing is downloading and installing patches for it.
You really think a publisher is gonna give a shit about that? It's not like *they* get all the heat when a buggy game is released. They want to maximize sales and most sales happen right after release. Just look at the buggy console games that go around now. Are console games really that much more stable than PC games?
With PC games, at least you can easily patch your game. That's done in 5 minutes instead of actually going out to buy/order/wait for a CD. You know how gamers hate the sunlight.
...there'll be a whole new breed of gamers to make jokes about "gaben" :)
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
...Epic Games released some new screens from Gears of War and chuckled. "Silly whiney fat man."
I bought multiple copies of Half Life so that I could kick the hell out of my GF's kids both on LAN and online. When valve killed WON, it was a minor inconvienence because we could still play CS 1.5 on the lan, but CS 1.6 requires Steam and It pisses me off to no end.
When I found out that Steam would be required for HL2, even for single player I decided to not buy it,(just for good measure) EVER.
No one is disputing that Valve can do whatever they want with their software and because of their decision I have decided not to buy it.
That's 3 copies that they didn't sell to me alone.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
"But what's your response to new content? What's going to happen to things like free levels and, for example, the free ninja gaiden update that was made available."
Sega managed to run new levels off a memory card just fine, for example in the Dreamcast version of Skies Or Arcadia.
"And honestly, what's wrong with FIXING something? I see no problem with updates."
I _do_ see a problem with shoving a broken, disfunctional product out the door. I very much like it that when I buy a game, it actually works. I _do_ see a problem with paying to be a beta-tester for EA's, Vivendi's, etc, buggy unfinished crap.
And especially I _do_ see a problem with patches that screw up my saved games directly (I can thing of a dozen games, starting with Fallout 2, where applying the patch forced me to restart the whole damn game from the start), or indirectly (yay, for some RPG patches where they randomly altered the game balance and made all my character's skills useless, _and_ made a bunch enemies immune to physical damage... when I'm playing a fighter. What am I supposed to use there? Bad language? Time to start a new character again.)
That's what I liked about console games so far: when I buy a game it's a _finished_ product. I can think of only exactly _two_ console games that ever needed a patch, out of the literally _hundreds_ I own. (And out of those two, one had a free replacement from the publisher, and the other "only" had multiplayer exploits, but was otherwise rock-solid and enjoyable as a single-player game.) The rest just worked.
That's it. When I buy a console game, I _know_ it will work. From day one. I can randomly pick any game off the PS2 aisle, take it home, pop it in, and _know_ that it'll never crash, never fall into the void, and generally just work.
You know why? Because the publisher knows it can't be patched, so they'll test the _hell_ out of it before release. And if they're running out of time or budget, they'll cancel a game, but never shove an unfinished piece of crap out the door.
Yes, no software is perfect, but there's a _massive_ difference between having some minor exploit in an obscure sidequest (like being able to claim your reward twice) in a console game, and the utterly broken stuff that gets shipped on the PC on account that it can be patched later.
That's what's wrong with "FIXING something" in the PC world. It's something that sounds _great_ in theory, but in practice it's what caused the deluge of unfinished buggy _crap_ shoved out the door untested. It just caused the "ah, it shows the starting menu, let's ship it. We can patch it later" mentality to run rampant.
It caused such crap as, say, the German version of Victoria which literally could only show the startup menu as released. _Literally_. If you actually tried starting a campaign, the game threw a script _syntax_ error. Yes, a _syntax_ error. Not something even remotely blamable on drivers or hardware. It had a typo in the scripts and couldn't run on _any_ hardware.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I have seen bugs in console games, sure - but nothing on the order of PC games.
Of course I have a PS2, where they really don't have a choice in the matter - it has to work prety much as well as it can. From reading reports of issues with games like KOTOR it seems like XBox game makers have been a bit more lax on that front.
Again I'd rather not play a game with some hideous bug waiting to vaporize hours of effort. I've stopped playing games before when it happened... it was the stability of console games that drew me away from PC games in the first place and I've not regretted it at all.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I wanted to say you have voiced excellent points here. One I'd like to add to your list--- draconian control over mods. From what I can tell, if someone comes out with a naked mod, or an unlicensed Simpsons mod, Steam can prevent your copy of HL2 from loading it. Another name for this is "content control."
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I'm not a console programmer, so I don't know the details of exactly what it takes to code on either X360 or PS3, but I do know Gabe Newell isn't making any real arguments either.
The whole harddisk deal is a good example. Except the XBox, no console ever in history could rely on a harddisk. This doesn't seem to make any other developers whine and moan.
He seems to make Sony's Cell-architecture into a pure political decission. Whether it is partly political can be debated, but such absolute fear of change is just apathic (and somewhat paranoid). It's not like this would be the first console ever to have a different architecture.
But in the last paragraph all seems to be clear; the Steam system (which, incidentally, they're selling) will solve all problems. This somewhat echoes his sentiments towards the X360 and PS3 architectures; forcing developers to "lock in" to a certain mindset (the Steam development model). Could all his tears just be crocodile tears?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Well, I _am_ a programmer, and I did program long enough in assembler to have some idea of the problems of porting stuff to completely different architectures like the Cell. Though I should also add that it's been some 7 years since I've had anything to do with programming _games_, so better take this stuff with a lot of salt.
Adding a proprietary content-delivery system does _nothing_ to make programming the Cell any easier. If you have trouble programming to a certain architecture, that's that. It doesn't matter if you ship your finished product via Steam, Fileplanet, DVD's, whatever. You have to get it to run on that architecture _before_ you have anything to ship. If you can't port it to the Cell to start with, you won't _have_ anything to ship, with or without Steam.
So taken strictly as a platform for delivering _finished_ content, it's like saying "But Intel could make much lower-power Pentium 4 CPUs if they sold it on eBay." That bogus.
But I think I can actually see what they're after. Don't think distribution, think the ability to patch. That's what they'd like on their console ports.
The _only_ thing such an auto-updater offers is the ability to publish some buggy unfinished untested POS and try to patch it later. Which, sorry, isn't what console gaming is all about.
So there you go. All his whining about how he'd like Steam and a HDD on every console is basically just saying, "but we just can't be arsed to have some proper QA, we just can't get it right for a console release, and we'd _really_ love to release it anyway and patch it later via Steam."
I.e., I don't think it's necessarily crocodile tears, but the whining and bitching of someone who's just locked in the "shove it out the door now, patch it later" metality of the PC gaming scene. Yeah, I can see how he'd feel more comfortable being able to pull the same crap on consoles. But as a consumer it isn't something I want to put up with.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"Sony must make the PS3 as easy to program for as possible, but that does not at all mean that it should keep its architecture even remotely compatible with competing platforms."
It requires you to be the biggest player in the market. If you are not the dominating force, people would ignore YOU rather than the others if you are too different. The Xbox 360 will be out before the PS3 which could matter.
It really is just like high school. If you are popular, you can afford to be different. If you are not you had better conform or face the consequences.
I bought HL2 last Christmas and great game by the way. I spent a couple of weeks playing it most evenings and finished the single player game. I'm not really into multiplayer as I'm not as competitive as the college students and kiddies that play these games all day every day. So, I tried to sell my game on eBay once I'd finished it but forgot/overlooked the insanity of Steam which says:
CDKeys are special serial numbers printed on retail copies of Half-Life and other games in the Half-Life family. Before Steam, this key was used as an anti-piracy measure, and became the user's unique ID code when playing the game online. With Steam, the CDKey can be used as a "proof of purchase" code that will grant your Steam account access to some of the games available through Steam.
Each CDKey may only be used with one Steam account. Once used, it is permanently bound to that account, and may not be used with another. Deleting the account will not free the CDKey to be used again.
Luckily, a buyer on eBay queried whether I would be giving my Steam account details along with the original DVD. Call me paranoid, but I don't like the sound of providing account details to a stranger that are associated with me so I looked into whether the game would still work without the Steam account.
Retail Package CD-Key Reset from Valve
If you still have your original printed CD-Key and product CD from a retail package for a Valve product to prove ownership, we can reset your CD-Key however, there is a $10.00 handling fee for this service.
This transfer will remove the CD-Key from the account that is currently using the CD-Key, and add it to your account. To do this you will need to have a working Steam account (create a new one, if you do not have one or do not have access to your current account).
No buyer is going to pay $10 on top of the auction price for a second hand game so I'm now stuck with a game that I don't want.
Thanks Valve, that's the last time I buy a game from you.
Go back 20 years & there were thousands of individuals & small groups of people producing games for the likes of the C64, Spectrum, etc. This meant that to make money out of the games industry, you had to create an innovative game that was either something entirely new or pushed the hardware beyond it's perceived limits.
However, along came the businessmen & all these independent games producers were either absorbed into much bigger companies or driven out of the games industry. With big money behind them, these companies could spend lots of money "packaging" the games with colourful boxes, shiny manuals & hugely complex pre-game or in-game movies.
As it stands today, small independent games developers, whilst they do a good job in many respects, are restricted to writing "smaller" games with less market appeal or penetration because they simply do not have the money to market their games or "package" them as they might want to.
Gabe Newell is a part of "today's" game-maker generation where the few big players that are left in the games industry, both hardware & software players, are trying to kill each other off so as to wrest control of more of it for themselves. This means that innovation and ease of programming get sacrificed in favour of expensive licensing and hardware lock-in - if Gabe can't see that for himself then he doesn't deserve to be in business.
As far as I am concerned, the sooner this version of the greedy games industry implodes in on itself, the better & if Newell is a casualty of that, then so be it - my sympathies lie with the likes of John Carmack and ID software who do genuinely work hard to encourage cross-platform games and give the source back to the smaller developers when they're done with it.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Nobody is forcing anyone to develop for consoles. If you don't like the platform then don't develop for it.
I guess many are tempted to consoles due to the slightly less common piracy.
Commercial programmers are interested in code reuse and being able to develop fast. The games programmers years ago would hae shrugged at having APIs available, poking the chips gives you absolute control and lets you get the most out of the hardware.
Is this guy talking about Sony or Microsoft? From my understanding, Valve has recently enjoyed the role of sticking to the wicked i386/Windows/DirectX cement shoes; riding on the back of that big smelly and scaley giant.
"So don't get programmed by anybody but yourself" --Bill S. Preston, Esquire
1. Both the Dreamcast and the PS2 support mice and keyboards for FPS or RTS. In fact, with the PS2 you can just take any USB keyboard or mouse, plug it in, and play. (The Dreamcast needed a special connector on its keyboard and mouse.)
2. The world isn't made only of RTS and FPS, and frankly for everything else I actually prefer an analog gamepad or joystick. Even on the PC.
E.g., have you tried playing a space combat or flight sim with a keyboard and mouse? I still remember trying to dogfight X-Wings and TIE-Fighters with the mouse. Oooer, now that was a _painful_ exercise. The _only_ game in that genre I can think of that was actually enjoyable to play with a mouse was Freelancer.
Or for a lot of RPGs, using a gamepad to control the character is actually easier and more natural.
E.g., I actually own both the PC and PS2 versions of Summoner, and I'll use it as an example because the interface was very different in the two versions. For the PC port they actually went through the trouble of making it resemble a typical PC game interface, where you mouse-click on the ground to move there, or on an item to interact with it.
You know what? I honestly preferred the gamepad version and wished that the PC version offered that as an option. Not only it was more comfortable, but some levels like sneaking around through the palace were actually easier with a gamepad.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Most parts in a game cannot be parallelized well.
Only crude splitting is possible, like network, graphics, AI, sound, physics each having its own thread.
Sound, physics and network are loaded in their own threads already - but for low latency, and not for high speed. It is vital for the network code to be independent of the rest (like the graphics card blocking everything - ping requests cannot be answered, and the connection drops). Same for sound: unlike graphics, sound cannot "stutter", because it is much more disturbing, thus the whole sound stream must continue without interrumption. Threads are ideal for this. Physics engines are loaded in their own threads sometimes to be able to deal better with varying step sizes.
Further threading? I can only imagine of one thread for each network connection, one thread for each AI, and one or several threads for loading levels in the background. But how can I speed up RENDERING with threads? Sending a visitor through a scenegraph isnt very thread-friendly. The different steps (visibility determination, reordering for least state switches to prevent pipeline flushes) cannot be parallelized, since they depend on each other. So. Can anyone explain me where one could further parallelize?
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
Fortunately there were hacks to get round the restriction. Running SLIRP on a remote box via SSH, in this case. Despite that, Steam is still broken for not supporting web proxies.
I would go even further and say that Steam should support non-networked authentication, say by telephone or post. Some people don't even have dial-up - why should people without a Net connection be locked out of HL2?
You're an immobile computer, remember?
Like hell I'll buy a system that runs on steam, petrol maybe but whats wrong with electricity
To sum up Gabe's Statements
Vista (unbelievably) might not be much good. (Shock, horror!)
XBox 360, by not necessarily having a hard drive, makes console development, which traditionally can't depend on having hard drive, harder. That makes sense.
Sony's fundamentally different chip design requires different programming techniques, and might be harder to port. Waaaah!
However, this fundamentally different chip design isn't designed to speed up processing, distribute tasks more effectively or demonstrate an important and new approach to general-purpose computing... no, it's solely to ensure vendor lock-in to Sony. No, really.
Steam solves all these problems (next-gen games being hard to develop, consoles lacking hard drives, different chip designs needing new skills, and Sony evilly locking us in to their own architecture), without in any way having anything to do with any of them. Steam good. Buy Steam. Buy it now.
I'm not saying he doesn't have the odd point, but does anyone else find Gabe Newell's pronouncements more and more whiny? Far from the industry god that brought us HL, now he's verging on sounding pathetic. Oooh, help, help, next-gen development is hard... radically different processor architectures require different programming techniques... oooh... lacking non-standard console peripherals makes console programming hard... oooh.
Gabe? We know. Sit down. It isn't going to change because you're whining about it in every interview you give.
And the last paragraph really was the limit - suggesting Steam (a new distribution system) would really have any fucking efect on the actual problems he'd raised? It's a billing and download service, not a fucking hard-drive, and not a middleware layer for the PS3. What were they smoking in the interview, and WTF does a bloody Steam advert have to do with the actual issues they talked about?
I'd say Gabe should come back to developing PC games, but frankly if a missing-or-not hard drive is twisting his nuts these days, god only knows what he'd think trying to develop for the heterogenous PC platform again...
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
It's not like Microsoft is making it easy for XBox360 games to be ported to the PS3, or the Revo.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
When the day comes that I can take a brand-new & high-end console game out of a box, install it onto the console's HD so I won't have to hunt for the disk every time I want to play it, and configure it properly to suit the way I want to play it: Yes. Till then: No.
That's just it, if you can't use a product in 15 years time you haven't brought it you've just licensed it temporaraly under the delusion that you purchased it. It'd be an easy job being an antiques dealer in a hundred years time, since they won't have to learn anything about the past hundred years where everyting had a lifespan of sub 15 years.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Look, People buy consoles for all the unique games available. They certainly are not looking for some random crappy port that is already available elsewhere. If you want Mario you buy Nintendo, if you want Gran Turismo you buy PS2, if you want Halo you buy XBox.
Devs need to quit worrying about ports, and start making new and unique games for platforms. Leave Half-Life 2 on the PC and bring something new and exciting to the PS3, and something entirely different to the Gamecube, and yet something completely different to the XBox. Thats what they're there for. Different gaming types. Not ports!
This is their true 'master plan' for the video game industry. Not to become #1 in console sales (not that they're not trying), but to become the dominant software platform in the industry.
They tout a lot of benefits, such as all console becoming compatible, etc. But the flip side of this would be that the console makers lose all their clout and differentiation from the others, as they would all become box makers more or less, just like PC makers today.
There are benefits and disadvantages for consumers in such a scenario (I prefer the current system to a MS-dominated one), but there are huge benefits to Microsoft. There's some differentiation between PC's, but not that much. Much less than GameCube vs. PS2 vs. XBox...
I have a tough time picking a side in this debate, because all of the various arguments -- when you subtract the vitriol, ad hominem attacks, and cynicism -- are good points and shouldn't be easily discarded.
Games will be hard to port, developers need to accept the new reality that performance gains will come from paralellism, Steam-like services provide tremendous benefits, steam-like service have very troubling consequences, and so on...
I'm just going to sidestep the argument(s) by owning all three platforms. My retirement fun can wait
What bothers me is that nobody seems to have noticed that Valve, after breaking ties with Vivendi Universal (who some poor souls may know as Sierra), has decided to let Electronic Arts re-publish all their games! WTF? It's like the people at Valve said, "Okay, we finally broke free of the evil, greedy clutches of our publisher - now who out there can treat us even worse?"
I can only hope that this is step two of a devious crusade to smear the public image of all the major publishers by courting them with Half-Life franchise publishing deals and then following up with vicious lawsuits.
I'd also like to know how they managed to get EA to publish for them without giving up the rights to concurrently and independently publish titles via Steam, as I know that Valve would never ever give up that option. They almost seem to be more proud of Steam than they are of their Half-Life and Source engines.
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.