"I think [PS3 is] a waste of everybody's time," he said. "Investing in the Cell, investing in the SPE gives you no long-term benefits.""There's nothing there that you're going to apply to anything else. You're not going to gain anything except a hatred of the architecture they've created. I don't think they're going to make money off their box. I don't think it's a good solution," he continued.
-Gabe Newell
On one hand the argument does make a lot of sense. Gabe is of course talking about the Playstation3's hardware. While it is powerful, it is also complex.
What grates on my nerves is that there is another good reason why Gabe and Valve have such problems developing for the Playstation3.
The Playstation3 uses Linux and OpenGL. Vavle has deliberately avoided developing for either technology and only recently posted a position for an engineer to help port games to Linux. There, is thus, from my point of a view, a decided lack of people within Valve who are equipped to work with the Playstation3 to begin with.
To try to put this in perspective, this is like going to a motorcycle repairman for a problem with your car. Yes, both vehicles have wheels, and both have engines. Typically cars and motorcycles both have seats and both have sets of gauges to tell about the internal performance of the engine.
They are, however, two completely different machines with very little in common.
The same holds true between the Playstation3 and the Windows based WindowsXP and Vista, and the WinNT5 kernel based Xbox 360. It takes a different skillset to work with each product, and from my viewpoint, Valves hiring history means they don't have very many people with the skillset to work on the Playstation3.
So it's a no duh argument from Gabe Newell. Sure, the Playstation3 is complex, but there'd be a lot more wiggle room to make complaints if Valve games and Steam already were out on Linux. With no Linux client? Gabe really doesn't have much room to be speaking on the Playstation3.
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