14 DAY TRIAL // One of the biggest releases in 2007 was Valve's The Orange Box pack. It did not only contain the eagerly anticipated Half Life 2: Episode 2, but also Team Fortress 2 and the phenomenal Portal. This, coupled with the fact that both the original Half Life 2 and its first episode were bundled in the pack, meant that the pack was something every gamer, whether they were using the PC, Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, would want.
But it seems that only the PC and Xbox 360 users got satisfaction out of it, as the PlayStation 3 version, which was handled by Electronic Arts instead of Valve, had lag issues and bad loading times. This has now led Valve's Doug Lombardi to reveal that, overall, the PS3 Orange Box was the stepchild version of the product, as it didn't offer the same great experience.
“We look at it as if we were customers of this product, how would we want to be treated and what sort of product would we want out of it?” Lombardi said. “We've run a couple of experiments over the years of PlayStation in general; we did Half-Life on PS2 with an outside company and then we did Orange Box PS3 with an outside company. We weren't able to deliver the same type of product on PS3 and PS2 for that matter that we were on the 360 and PC.”
He went on to say that, until the company could get people devoted to the PS3, we still would not see anything for the platform from it. “Until we have the ability to get a PS3 team together, until we find the people who want to come to Valve or who are at Valve who want to work on that, I don't really see us moving to that platform. We've kind of learned a lesson in that again, if we were customers of that product on PlayStation, we'd feel like we sort of got the stepchild version of the product while the guys on the PC and the 360 got the sweet version of it.”
We've already heard that Valve thinks that the PS3 is too complicated to develop for, and coupled with this statement and the fact that the recent Left 4 Dead and the upcoming Left 4 Dead 2 won't arrive on the PS3, it seems that Sony fans will have to wait quite some time until they will see new Valve titles for this platform.