may the force be with you

It's been mentioned several times already that some developers are finding development on next-generation platforms to be more costly, more time consuming and more difficult, but Gabe Newell, Valve Software's founder and managing director, seems to be leading the charge in voicing complaints on the direction the video game industry is headed.

>In a surprisingly candid interview with Computer Gaming World—part of the October issue hitting newsstands next week and also in video format on 1UP.com—the Half-Life 2 developer takes the opportunity to slam just about everything related to next-gen development, including Longhorn (which is now called Windows Vista), Xbox 360, and PS3.

Lots of whining or valid points?
>"... 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. At all. And I had the same conversation with the Xbox 360 guys. It's like Xbox 360 doesn't make my life any better, and in fact, it makes it a lot worse, as you're telling me I can't count on having a hard drive," said Newell.

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"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," Gabe Newell, Valve Software

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>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. Therefore, the team is quite used to having a hard drive present for game development.

>According to Chris Donahue, group manager for Windows gaming and graphics and lead technical evangelist of developer relations, XNA and DirectX should make developers' jobs far easier when creating games for Windows or Xbox 360. "... we're making the tools to make it easier to make games for Microsoft's gaming platforms. We're looking to the game development community to surprise gamers with new ideas of what they can do with these tools—and of course, we're helping developers build games that can take advantage of the huge power of the next generation of hardware, both Xbox 360 and Longhorn," Donahue told GameDAILY BIZ in a prior interview. Apparently Gabe Newell isn't buying into this, though.

Bashing Sony
>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.

>Newell continued, "They're saying, 'Make your code not run on anything but one of our machines, and we're betting that we'll have market share that's so high that everybody will have to write code for our platform, and we'll just starve the air from the other platforms by absorbing everybody's R&D budget and making their code less portable.' I understand why that makes sense from Sony's perspective, but that doesn't solve any problems for software developers such as ourselves."

Steam to the rescue!
>So what does solve some problems for developers? Newell believes Valve's Steam service can be part of the solution. Developer Ritual has already adopted the Steam technology to sell Sin Episodes, and Valve is hoping that other developers will look to Steam as well, or develop Steam-like systems of their own. In fact, Electronic Arts may soon take that approach, according to Tom Frisina, VP and General Manager of EA Partners.

>"So with Steam we're saying, 'Here's a set of tools that software developers need, focused on solving the problems that we have with this next generation of games.' And that includes billing, updates, product support, connecting our customers to one another, and things like that. So it'll be interesting to see how important that functionality is to other developers. In the case of the guys at Ritual, they seem to think it's useful and solves problems for them," said Newell.

>Check out the magazine or website for the complete interview, which covers more on Steam, Half-Life 2: Aftermath, Lost Coast, among other topics.