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Valve Hoping For 360/PC Play, Scared of PS3 Online
Valve's movement to the console space has been slow, but this year will see the release of Half-Life 2 on both the 360 and PS3. They seem to be having mixed reactions to that move. On the one hand (according to CVG), they're very much hoping that 360/PC crossplay will be possible for their upcoming Team Fortress 2. On the other hand (according to Game Informer and 1up), their reaction to the PS3's online component is one of fear. Valve's Marketing representative Doug Lombardi: "PS3 is brand new and PS3's online is kind of scary so we're hoping that EA is going to be a strong partner for us. (laughs) It's always the scariest thing when it's not all yours. With the PC it's all ours, Steam is all ours, code's ours, game's ours. On 360 we're making it, we've made it before, we know what the Live thing is, although it's Microsoft's so we kind of know it. PS3 we're not building it, we haven't made a PS3 title before, and we don't really know what PS3 online really is. It's always the devil you don't know that you're the most scared of."
Sorry you all had to see that. Thats almost certainly PaiZuri from digg (http://www.digg.com/users/PaiZuri/news/dugg) he tends to copy and paste that comment (and others like it) in all gaming posts regardless of content. Its a shame that the two pools are only separated by the rope.
Talking with the guy who wrote most of the networking code for Resistance:Fall of Man, he made it sound like Sony's approach to networking is the WORST of both worlds. You have to do everything yourself because Sony basically just gives you a device driver. Friends Lists, invites, chat handling, etc. are all up to the developer. There are no libraries or even standards for these. But, unlike the PC, you have to log every game connect with a Sony server so you still have big brother collecting data about games users play. This is like the 360, but at least MS provides policing and a library that doesn't take any new game resources (chat, invites, etc. all come out of the already allocated OS resources) or development time or worries about certification issues. It's no wonder Sony's online is "free". They don't provide anything they could charge for! The only thing Sony does have, its online store, is also free on the 360.
Dreamcast Quake 3 vs PC Quake 3. Keyboard+mouse won so hard it wasn't even funny.