Valve calls PS3 development a waste of everybody's time

When Gabe Newell, one of Valve’s founders, was asked by Edge magazine whether or not he still had any issue with the PlayStation 3’s design architecture, he replied, “Absolutely. I think [PS3 is] a waste of everybody’s time. 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.”

Newell also pointed out that porting the PC game to the Xbox 360 wasn’t an effortless experience either, but that Microsoft’s system was far more receptive to the developer’s technologies. “We’ve learned that you can create a framework where all you need to do is recompile for each of those three platforms. You know, that’s a sort of abstraction of our goal. With The Orange Box we could do that, so getting Left 4 Dead up on the 360 was like a day’s worth of work. It requires a big technology investment to be able to do that. I was pretty skeptical that we would; I thought there was going to be more work than that.”