Valve's Gabe Newell on Apple's Gaming Failures

The site Kikizo has up a lengthy interview with Gabe Newell, co-founder of Valve and one of the minds behind the Half-Life 2 games. Though their discussion centers around the Orange Box (slated for release soon) and the titles contained therein, the discussion kicks off with Newell's scathing dress-down of Apple's understanding of the importance of gaming: "We tried to have a conversation with Apple for several years, and they never seemed to... well, we have this pattern with Apple, where we meet with them, people there go 'wow, gaming is incredibly important, we should do something with gaming'. And then we'll say, 'OK, here are three things you could do to make that better', and then they say OK, and then we never see them again. And then a year later, a new group of people show up, who apparently have no idea that the last group of people were there, and never follow though on anything. So, they seem to think that they want to do gaming, but there's never any follow through on any of the things they say they're going to do. That makes it hard to be excited about doing games for their platforms."

Comments

touché

[deftcoder]

As far as I know, Apple hasn't had to leak the source code to one of their own projects to cover for it running waaaay over schedule.

They have a 1-up on Valve in that regard.

Specifics?

[Amigori]

What specifically is holding them back? Are they looking for some kind of subsidy from Apple, or something? OpenGL is standard and well documented. HID is standard. CoreAudio is fairly new for audio programming. TCP/IP standard stacks for netplay. XCode is a decent IDE. I agree that graphics cards are certainly behind PC versions, but I'm not sure what can be done about that. Any geek seriously into gaming is already going to have a 2+button USB mouse to plug in. And that B.S. question about an Apple console...pointless.

"wow, gaming is incredibly important, we should do something with gaming". And then we'll say, "OK, here are three things you could do to make that better"...

Three things that could be better, but do already function, yet you're not using them.

"We'd love it if they would get serious about it. But they never have, and can't even follow trough on any of their commitments for game developers."

Perhaps this is because the developers Apple has been more interested in move systems worth $4k+ and develop software packages at $1k+. The systems people buy for themselves are not the uber-equipped MacPros, but the iMacs and MacBooks, at least numbers-wise.

People who want to develop games for Mac need to think more like a console developer: 1) Here's a standard set of tools. 2) Here's a limited range of hardware. 3) Here's a growing market of people looking for games, both simple and advanced. Gabe and Valve have chosen to develop on the "cutting edge" for the advanced players, which means DX10, fancy Audio engines (for the 5% of users who have more than a 2.1 setup), support for Physics coprocessors, and as much bandwidth as the graphics card allows, all of which means Windows only. Nothing wrong with that, gotta make money somehow. The Mac gaming market is there, they just don't want to participate. And how many hardcore gamers of Valve's target market only have a Mac? No PC, PS2/3, Xbox, 360, etc. They'll get their gaming fix somehow.

Re:What Apple needs

[happyemoticon]

For the most part the only time I hear complaints out of Windows gamers is the ones that don't have enough cash to buy their own gear and have to live off of mommy and daddy's hand me downs.

Bitch about the memory and pat yourself on the back all you want but when is the last time a gig of ram cost more then the latest PS3 title? In perspective the issue of buying an off-the-shelf PC to play games on and adding the ram yourself is normally going to cost you less then the sales tax on most new machines.

It sounds like you just took my statement, added some pepper, and threw it back at me like it was a counter-argument.