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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."
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.
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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.
I'm sure that's the kind of thing Microsoft loves to hear after spending the lifetime of the Xbox being absolutely rabid about games not being allowed to patch themselves. MS has put a lot of effort into trying to keep their console running finished products, not hack jobs that aren't playable until three patches down the road, and now Valve wants to foist bug fests upon console players.
Maybe -- just maybe -- this type of plan will finally beat Valve over the head with a clue stick. After the abortion that was Half-Life 2 and the abomination that is Steam (interesting idea, crap execution), I'd be really happy to see them get back to the ground they seemed to be breaking with Half-Life.
On top of it all, on what planet is Gabe living where everyone has broadband enough to want to patch their Valve console games over and over? I can do other things on my computer while it downloads patches. On a console, you get to stare at a progress screen until it's done. No good. Especially not at 50 bucks a pop for console 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...
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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
Yeah, I really look forward to playing (for example) Final Fantasy, seeing it getting patched and next thing I know, the game balance got changed and my last savegames got useless, because I leveled the wrong character. You guys are way to fixated on multiplayer FPS games to see that this isn't a universally good thing. It might be nice in special cases like Counter-Strike, but please, don't force it onto people that don't want it. Else they might not want to spend their money on it.
To me, it comes off as the same type of whining that happened when game programmers switched from DOS to Windows/DirectX, and from C to C++. It's like asking "Have you seen any good games that aren't written in DOS? Have you seen any good games that take advantage of principles in OOP? Well, what is the point of then?"
It's pointless criticism. Yes, things actually do change, believe it or not! Besides, Valve will face the same (well, actually worse) problems with PCs, so they really have no room to complain.
The fact that Valve is now ill-prepared and complaining when this was all well foreseen is what's so infantile about their ramblings.
i agree completely. i will NEVER buy anything from valve EVER as long as steam is required. what really pissed me off was the fact that the original HL2 retail box didnt mention an internet connection being a game requirement.
steam is forbidden from ever being installed on any system i own period. i loved halflife single player and was looking forward to its sequal. i almost bought it. i played it briefly at a friends house and was about to walk out the door to go buy it when he mentioned that he had had to validate with steam for playing the first time. this was with a store bought retail copy.
i hated steam since its inception, unstable buggy POS software originally. i am sure they have taken care of any stability issues since then but i refuse to have a game developer tell me that i have to be online to play a single player game. i refuse to have a game developer tell me that he can install and do anything with my computer that he wants to at any time and i just have to suck it up. screw that.
i voted with my wallet. valve will NEVER have me as a customer as long as steam is a requirement.
"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.
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