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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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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
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.
Exactly. To a non-coder it sounds like a walk in the park eh j3rry?. The x360 is, what, a triple core powerpc chip, and the PS3 is a less powerful chip, almost identical to one of the x360 cores, but with 7 SPE's (the S stands for stupid, not synergistic or whatever the fuck their marketroids named em)
These consoles are taking the idea of multithreading to the max, and both are taking very different approaches. Porting between the consoles was hard enough this gen (xbox getting good pc ports as it pretty much was a pc, the gcn being a ppc and the ps2 being made by sony, who can never make anything easy to develop for, and required alot of assembly code and hand vectorization to get a game working well on the already slower hardware) but now we've got not just different architectures to support, but completly and totally different programming models to support.
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.
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?
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.
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
I completly agree. You could have a seperate audio thread, maybe a seperate one for networking, but it's not worth the hassle of sync'ing the threads and watching out for race conditions. I honestly have to wonder how much speed you lose from things like that.
Offtopic bit (sorry but it will tie in at the end): Multithreaded games remind me of the same silliness of monolithic vs micro kernels. Back when Linus introduced Linux, there was a debate with Mr. Tannenbaum (creator of Minix), Linus and other users over which was better. The micro kernel idea, which minix used, was seperating things like disk i/o into seperate proccess outside of the kernel. Basically the kernel became very small, and managed things like messaging between the proccesses. There were some reasons for this that I won't go into. You can read the beggining of the book Open Sources, which is free online, for the story and logs of the debate. Anyways, these kernel's simply didn't preform better than monolithic kernels such as Linux, even though they should, and were not more stabble, even though they should've been. They sounded great on paper, but no one had been able to implement one realistically. As we can see, Linux is one of the fastest/feature rich kernel's out there (at least the 2.6 branch) yet it is still monolithic (although you can have modules - but not for everything, not for the most important things) We also have OSX, which adopted most of the MACH kernel, and is therefore a micro kernel, but as you can see by the recent benchmarks ars technica (I think it was them) have posted, it still doesn't compare to Linux for most things (like mysql and server stuff), although it is equal in others, like workstation stuff.
Anyways, sorry for the completly off topic exposistion, but I think we can learn a lesson here is that even though something may sound good on paper, and be theoretically a better way to do things, I can imagine it not working out, but maybe it will. There's alot of potential for dual core (The DS already uses this, the N64 did etc) and maybe even triple, but Sony's Cell CPU, with one main core and seven little SPE's is just overboard.
More like "OH NOES! An alternative to my current specialization! It requires adapting and additional investment, therefore I must fear it!"
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
When the makers of the big 3 FPS games all agree on it, I think there may just be a real issue.
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
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.
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
What, me worry?
The real reason is that we can't keep making CPU's faster without going this route. Intel is currently incapable of making a P4 hit 4ghz, which they originally planned for over a year ago. IBM was unable to deliver Apple a 3 ghz G5 like they promised. We're reaching physical limitations of the silicon here. Because of this, the future is multicore.
Also, a 5ghz out-of-order PowerPC 970 (or similar) would draw tons more power than the three simplified in-order PPC cores running at 3.5ghz in the Xbox 360. Performance per watt is becoming increasingly important in both PC's and consoles. Do you really want a console that sounds like a jet engine and heats up your room? How about one that draws so much power, it trips your breaker if it's on the same circuit as your fridge? Didn't think so.
Sony and Microsoft honestly took the more sensible and future-proof route. Sure, the first-gen games for the systems would have been a bit better and loads easier to write if they just put in the fastest PPC970 or Athlon64 available in the damn thing, but these systems have to have a shelf life of around 4-5 years. By then, ALL PC's will be multi-core -- period. Look at Intel, AMD, and IBM's road-map. They can't just turn up the clockspeed forever. Sure, there will be process improvements, and marginal gains, but not like in the past. Intel's "next-gen" architecture is largely based on multi-core Pentium-M's. Why? The growing power requirements of the P4's is ridiculous, and limits the applications of the CPU's. Plus, the P4 can't keep scaling up, despite the Prescott core's absurd 31-stage pipeline!
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
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
"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 hate DRM in iTunes... There are only two advantages to iTunes, instant purchasing, and the ability to buy a single track.... In every other way they are inferior to CDs.
I like Steam though. It gives me advantages over the CD version.
1. I can download the game from any computer without the physical media.
2. I never have to search for patches, and it is always up to date.
3. I have gotten 3 expansions for free (HL2:Deathmatch, Opposing Force, and Blueshift) I will also be getting Lost Coast soon. They could give me free stuff without Steam, but this makes it easy.
Then again, I've never had any significant problems with Steam. And I can understand some frustrations that some people have... but those problems haven't affected me.
Please get away from the idea that any commercial venture gives you, the consumer, anything "for free" - it simply does not happen.
You incurred no additional charges for the expansions but you can bet your life they were factored into the original cost of the game you purchased & the fact that making those expansions "free" would generate more sales of the original game.
Yes, I'm sure you feel that you benefitted from this but you need to remember that no successful business does anything unless it is likely to make the business more money - otherwise, the shareholders will start complaining & dumping their stock.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
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
At least on the PS3 (and before on the PS2) the point is not having several static threads doing work, but putting all the units in the system to work at once. So while the SPEs (similar to VUs on the PS2) churn out some 3d vertex translation list and do physics, the cpu can do game logic or some other stuff. The best optimization is definitely having everything running 100% at once, although I suspect what will usually happen (which makes life easier and is acceptable too) is that units operate in sync but simultaneously (e.g. the main cpu starts everything else each frame, and the all work at once.) There will be some wasted time as some unit will finish sooner, but being kept in sync simplifies programming. It is not like threads in a PC which operate asynchronously (unless you explicitly sync)