14 DAY TRIAL // Valve is one of the most loved companies in the gaming industry, thanks to its very good titles and to the fact that it struggles to offer the best experience to all of the platforms on which it brings its games.
Fresh from declaring that it has a very good relationship with Microsoft, which is responsible for both the Xbox 360 and the PC platforms, the company's Tom Leonard, who works on game design, has revealed the technical reason why they choose not to bring a lot of titles to the PlayStation 3, which is because of its complex architecture.
“The PC and the 360 are just more straightforward,” Leonard says. “We can focus on what we want to do, which is make game experiences, instead of sweating bullets over obscure architectural decisions they make with their platform. I didn’t come into this business in the 90s because of some technical fetish. I came in because I wanted to give people experiences that made them have fun.”
Leonard might have a point, as quite a few developers have complained about the complexity of the PS3, while Sony and various studios that work with the company have revealed that, because it is complicated, games will continue to evolve on it, and not remain the same, like on the Xbox 360.
This is all just a small part of the console war, though, as we will see many statements like this for quite some time, just as long as there will be competing devices available on the market. Overall, Valve's statements are pretty well founded, as the Xbox 360 is quite close to the PC, to which the company dedicates most of its technical and development resources, while the PS3 isn't something it has worked on intensively, only with the help of Electronic Arts, which ported 2007's The Orange Box on said platform.