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

Re:Other points from the article:

[Das Modell]

Take it from me: if you like team-based shooters and haven't played the TF2 beta, you're missing out in a big way.

I lost all interest the second I watched a gameplay vid where the losing team becomes unable to attack before the next round starts, allowing the winning team to frag them without resistance. DoD did the same thing, and it's one of the reasons why I don't play it anymore. I'll maybe try TF2 when Valve stops annoying the player for shits and giggles. TF2 could have been a good game but this is more than enough to convince me that Fortress Forever is the way to go.

Re:Hey! They got games for Mac too...

[aichpvee]

No one benefits from the "innovation" of microsoft lock-in. So no, we don't all benefit.