Valve Says PS3 Complexity Hinders Game Development

[Pendragon9]

I guess Valve is just different when it comes to making games. Everyone else seems to have a good time developing for the PS3. And even if it is harder, I certainly don't hear other companies complaining.

Though I guess I can't penalize them for this. They do make funny games like Team Fortress and good games like Half Life.

I guess I'll just have to forget about Team Fortress updates. I'll have to go back to the other 30 AAA titles on the PS3.

Oh, and....

snip

That post is deserving of epic win. Here here!

 

[Edge Damodred]

To be perfectly honest Valve has been quite lazy last several years. They've complained not only about the PS3 but even learning how to do multi-threaded and multi-core programming in general. Which had been around in programming long before the PS2 even came out.

Their game development has been laughable. Neither Half-Life expansion was done by Valve, Opposing Force was done by Gearbox and I can't even remember who did Blue Shift. They just converted Quake World Team Fortress over to their Quake 1/2 engine and called it Team Fortress Classic. Counter-Strike was not their game to begin with. The original Team Fortress 2 was supposed to come out at the same time as the original Unreal Tournament and the game had a much grander scope than what was released 8 years later. Instead it became a laughing joke upon release considering there was less content in it than their initial remake of Team Fortress! On top of that every update to Half-Life broke several mods which is what kept Half-Life going for so long.

Half-Life 2 seemed to me mostly a glorified physics demo, they just loved the gravity gun way too much. The game didn't even ship with multiplayer, even basic deathmatch until several months later. On top of that there were few maps that shipped with it. To make matters worse they continued to use Worldcraft/Hammer as an editor and did nothing to really update it. Working with static meshes and materials was a total pain in the ass.

Both Portal and Left 4 Dead were not done by the Valve development team. Instead they bought the respective teams and have now consumed part of them into their main office and threw away the rest.

Steam was a total train wreck for the first several years. The Friends list never worked and connections would constantly drop. They finally got their acts together although several HL mods were permanently broken when they forced the players to use Steam over WON.

Now as far as the PS3 being difficult to program for it's certainly different in some respects to PC and 360 development, but in others it works rather similar. The primary memory model used by the PS3 is closer to a PC than the 360 where it has separate system RAM and video RAM, the 360 has a shared memory pool between all hardware. The big difference in memory on the PS3 is that the SPE's on the Cell use local storage instead of cache. The difference is in local storage the processor only has direct access to what's in there. Cache on the other hand works more like a small table you place tools on when you're done with them but you'll need them again. Problem is you have to share that table with several other people working so tools get put back away and they're not always on hand because the person who put it away saw you hadn't used it in a while. The local storage on the other hand is like bringing a small toolbox into your work area so you need bring only what you need but no one's going to put it away when you're not using it.

The individual parts that make up the Cell processor are not new. IBM, Sony and Toshiba basically what had already been created and just put them in a different configuration to solve the cross memory usage of multi-core processing. I'm sure the 360 multi-core processor was designed to solve the same problem, such as having all 3 processors have separate L1 cache but share a common L2 cache so the same functions wouldn't require being executed always on the same processor. The processor types between them are different but similar code can be designed for both. The Cell uses a single PPU ~3.2 GHz for general computing plus 6 SIMD(Single Instruction Multiple Data) processors at about 3.0 GHz designed for brute force algorithms over large data sets(which games contain a lot of). The Xenon(360) processor uses 3 ~3.2GHz dual hardware thread processors probably to give a bit more flexibility at the cost of processing power.

The major difference between the two comes down to their SDK's. The 360 was designed with the intent of using DirectX which has its good things and bad things. The PS3 uses a lower level graphics API that takes a bit more work to get up and running but is much closer to the hardware. It has an OpenGL-like API but it is considered by most developers to be useless for anything other than prototyping. It uses the Cg shading language for shaders which is very close to the HLSL used by DirectX(the languages initially were the same as they were created jointly by nVidia and Microsoft, for legal purposes they have two different names Cg being nVidia's and HLSL Microsoft's).

But even with their differences there are several middleware solutions that totally abstract the hardware and native SDK's for both platforms including the Unreal Engine and Gamebryo(used in the making of Morrowind, Oblivion and Fallout 3). I'm sure Valve has made more than enough money to license an engine(they did it with HL 1 and based a lot of what they learned when they made Source off it) so basically it comes down to either laziness or just stupid hatred. The argument that it would be a waste of time to make it for the PS3 because has a smaller audience is completely invalid, both have user bases that well exceed 21 million as of the end of 2008 and the 360 just reached the 30 million mark so the PS3 isn't too far behind.

So all in all Valve needs get off their attitude or lazy ass, go on over to Insomniac's website where they post article after article on PS3 game programming secrets(all freely available to the public), go over to IBM.com and check out the numerous articles on the Cell processor over there and check out several popular game programming forums and do their homework. Else they're missing out on potentially %20-%30 more revenue per title!

 

[Credge]

Keyword there is ratio. That completely dodges the fact that the PS3 has less games made for it.

I don't really understand why that matters. If number of games on a system was a positive quality then the Wii would be undoubtedly the best. But, we see more shovelware on the Wii than we do on anything else.

So...?

That ratio is important, but not for the reason the original guy listed. Let me just use an example with small numbers that aren't accurate of reality but are accurate of the point.

Lets assume the PS3 has 100 games and the 360 has 200.

If the ratio of 'good' games to bad games on the PS3 (going off of something like metacritic) is 2/3 then this means that the PS3 has 66-67 good games on it.

If the ratio of 'good' games to bad games on the 360 (same thing) is 1/3 then this means that the 360 has 66-67 good games on it.

However, due to the large number of games the other console has, the chances of a consumer buying a bad game is increased dramatically. This generally results in a higher chance of a user getting buyers remorse and is almost definitely the case with many Wii owners.

So, really, both arguments are silly.

On one side you have more games but a higher chance of getting a bad game.

On the other you have fewer choices but a higher chance of getting a good game.

However, the 360 sits in the middle of this. You have the Wii with its plethora of bad games, the 360 with an average number of good and bad games, and the PS3 with the the largest number of good games.

You also have the Wii having the most games, the 360 having the second most, and the PS3 having the least.

What the ratio doesn't tell you, though, are how many total games and if they are comparable. For example, the 1/3 2/3rd analogy works fine when it's 100/200 but will not be the same if it's 100/250.

It's all a matter of choice. Besides, who actually cares about a games metascore?

 

[Blanks]

i think it makes sense..kinda i guess sony made the ps3 ready for the '8th generation' aswell as the '7th' since it says no developer can tap the full potential one would think that when the mystical next next gen comes out, ps3 games will be easier and running at 100%

just my opinion

 

[Ninja the KId]

"The complexity of the PlayStation 3 hinders quality game development."

And yet the PS3 has a higher ratio of games rated 8/10 or higher than any other system currently on the market.

Someone's not checking his facts...

And the best games made have almost all been PC or Xbox/Xbox 360. Shall I list a few?

Thief. Thief 2. Dawn of War. Winter Assault. Dark Crusade. KotOR. KotOR2. Baldur's Gate. Baldur's Gate 2. Planescape Torment. Diablo 2. Starcraft. Halo. Halo 3. Gears of War. Gears of War 2. Homeworld. Homeworld 2. Master of Orion 2. Sins of a Solar Empire. Dwarf Fortress. System Shock. System Shock 2. Mask of the Betrayer. World of Warcraft. Guild Wars. Nox. Company of Heroes.

Now your turn - see if you can find a game on the PS3 that compares to any of these.

Spoiler

The PS3 has no games that compare to any of the ones I listed.

So since you're taking titles from 3 different systems, does that mean we can use things from the PS2 and PS1?

Because in that case your whole point kinda falls apart. Unless you think comparing 10+ years of bilateral game development to 3 years of linear development is actually fair.

I was wondering when someone was gonna pick up on that.

 

[riggums530]

First this thread started out as people whining about valve, which was pretty pointless anyway. Now we're on to which games are better than others. Does any of this matter? People will always view different games differently. What you may think is awesome others may think is bad. Can we please just accept this and move on?

OT: I think valve have the right to do whatever they want with their games. They went through the trouble to make them and if they don't feel like spending time, money and manpower on porting it their games to the PS3 then thats their decision. Nothing I say or think will make any difference.

wow this is the smartest person on this post you could all learn a lesson from him exactly what he/she says is exactly what you people seem not to understand.

 

[Lord Krunk]

That last paragraph had me on the floor laughing. Even if you are a sony fanboy. YOu can;t actually belive that shit

That is some of the biggest bullshit I have ever heard.

I really makes no sense. Why would you ever make something harder to use when there is another similar product that is far easier to use?

And cheaper.

On-topic, we already knew this. The PS3 is hard to use, and Valve has reason to hate it. It's why I chose to evade the PS3 in my console armada.

 

[Bat Vader]

Yes, thats why the Ps3 has low quality games like LittleBigPlanet, Valkyria Chronicles and Metal Gear Solid 4, all of which are only capable on it, while the 360 has such gems as Too Human, Velvet Assassin and Ninja Blade.

Valve backed themselves into a corner, and refuse to admit they were wrong, despite all evidence to the contrary.

All of Valves game's are for the PC though and that is where most of their money is coming from. If a company does not want to release games on a certain console they have that right not to.

 

[Bat Vader]

"The complexity of the PlayStation 3 hinders quality game development."

And yet the PS3 has a higher ratio of games rated 8/10 or higher than any other system currently on the market.

Someone's not checking his facts...

And the best games made have almost all been PC or Xbox/Xbox 360. Shall I list a few?

Thief. Thief 2. Dawn of War. Winter Assault. Dark Crusade. KotOR. KotOR2. Baldur's Gate. Baldur's Gate 2. Planescape Torment. Diablo 2. Starcraft. Halo. Halo 3. Gears of War. Gears of War 2. Homeworld. Homeworld 2. Master of Orion 2. Sins of a Solar Empire. Dwarf Fortress. System Shock. System Shock 2. Mask of the Betrayer. World of Warcraft. Guild Wars. Nox. Company of Heroes.

Now your turn - see if you can find a game on the PS3 that compares to any of these.

Spoiler

The PS3 has no games that compare to any of the ones I listed.

Amazing. Your point crashed and burned on your first example. As fails go, thats pretty impressive.

Metal Gear Solid 4 crushes Thief and Thief 2. From then on, yeah, its basically a matter of opening a list of Ps3 exclusives and picking the one in question. Killzone 2 > Halo 1 and 3. Valkyria Chronicles > Kotor. LittleBigPlanet > everything.

This is all just an opinion though.

You seem to be getting angry because Valve insulted the PS3. It is not that important. Just get over it and move on.

 

[Abedeus]

Perhaps Indigo Dingo will provide us with a counter argument.

You mean a counter-insult then a constant stream of cursing, and put downs until people give up trying to be rational then people just leave and he claims the captainship of the failboat.

Okay, I'm getting sick of people going "LOLOLOL INDIGO DINGO TEH FAG FANBOI NUB LOLOLOL" just because he favors Sony over whatever. I'll admit, he gets off his rocker sometimes, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have any less valid points than anyone else here!

I think it's because he will always defend PS3, in ANY case. You say a bad word about PS3, and he will jump on you, blindly trying to fight people disliking his favorite console.

Everyone knows that he's the biggest PS3 and Sony fanboy on the Escapist.

 

[johnman]

"The complexity of the PlayStation 3 hinders quality game development."

And yet the PS3 has a higher ratio of games rated 8/10 or higher than any other system currently on the market.

Someone's not checking his facts...

First off, no gives a crap about ratings. Second, thats becauise it has FEWER games due to its retarded development tools so it will have a higer ratio wont it?

 

[skwareballz]

i think people forget that Microsoft makes xbox and also makes that thing you use to play games with on your PC...oh what it's called?? WINDOWS!!!!!! and in some attempt to make money they made it easier to port games from PC to 360. Valve sees the potential to make money with an audience that hasn't been into their games, believe it or not some people don't play PC games.

Plus everyone that is all boohoo of 360 graphics remember that it came out in 2005 and it's not getting any worse or better... consoles aren't supposed to have the best performance on purpose, cuz it's more about plug and play, you turn on the xbox and play the game with little to no load times, plus you get to sit more that 18 inches from the screen. this is why it doesn't matter how good your PC plays a game cuz your eyes can't even see full 1080 under like 6 ft away, so for something already 5 years old i'd say it's holding it's own

 

[Son of Makuta]

Sony might have something of a point in the 'keeping back potential' idea, although I still think it's a bit of a strange thing to do. Why not make it easier to program for now, open up its potential to more developers, and by doing so cut out a year or three of having only a trickling supply of games? I remember thinking at around the PS3's release time that there were hardly any truly interesting games coming out for it (I'm not a sports fan). It does now have things like LittleBigPlanet, but I think LBP might be a little overrated really. LBP's make-your-own-level party trick has existed for many years on the PC, going all the way back to Doom 1 and 2, and probably even before then. Not quite so explicitly, and you have to put more effort in in most cases, but you do have more potential. Hell, some FPSs even ship with level editors (Serious Sam 2, the Unreal series, etc).

What I'm getting at is that Sony may well have screwed themselves over a bit. Unless Valve have a big expansion or close off a couple of their ongoing projects, they won't be porting to PS3, which is a shame for PS3 owners as (to give them their due) Valve make some damn good games. My suspicion is that a couple of other developers may have done the same thing. Someone mentioned indie programmers making PS3 games; there are far more indie PC games than console ones, especially as it's only with the introduction of the online store that these games have had any kind of distribution console-wards, and the important ones I've heard of (World of Goo, Everyday Shooter [ES is on PS3, right?]) were germinated on the PC anyway. Sony are good at negotiating exclusive deals, which lands the PS3 most of its really good games I think, although the 360 has some attractive exclusives in its own right, like Darksiders. It seems to me that there are surprisingly few titles that actually overlap between the consoles, or between PC/PS3.

Having said all that, the PS3 *is* a monstrously powerful machine, and hopefully it'll have some kind of renaissance in a year or two and games take off for it. It'd be interesting to see how much graphical power can be pumped out of it (Crysis 2 anyone?).

 

[bodyklok]

It's a shame that valve feels that way, I really hope they will put Episode 3 on the PS3 though.

 

[Woe Is You]

Then they can say its cause they're lazy, not because quality is somehow hindered.

This is a good summary of it. [http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=16257985&postcount=200] Were the guys at Sucker Punch (a privately owned independent company to this day) lazy for developing only for the PS2 despite the fact that there were more advanced platforms around? Why shouldn't you pick your platform without being accused of being lazy?

Shut up and get back to making gaames you idiots, I don't care what you think about the PS3, nobody else should care, Gabe only cares because he wants more people to buy more valve games so he can eat himself to a heart attack the lazy bastard..

Yeah, we knew this but it isn't like the guys at Valve put out a press report saying that they don't like the PS3. This was a case of a reporter asking why Valve wasn't developing on the PS3. Since they were asking a developer instead of a PR guy, he wasn't beating around the bush. Complaining about that makes no sense, really.

 

[akmarksman]

Name one playstation that was easy to develop for.

Playstation 1. Or did you forget that it had a library rivaling that of the SNES/Genesis/NES libraries? Not to mention that the PS2 had many great games and a large library itself. I realize people have gotten lazy and aren't pushing consoles to their limits anymore (like the aforementioned SNES/Genesis/NES/PS1 did) but still, in the long run, both PS1 and PS2 were far better to design for than the PS3.

In fact, if you look back, complexity was one of the reasons that the Saturn and Dreamcast went belly up. Or at least it was one of the common reasons cited at the time.

Also, Indigo, really put a sock in it already about those games. They were all "capable" on the 360 or even the PC. Why didn't they go to it? Probably something to do with the whole "Exclusive" crap and the fact that people jack off to graphics more than they do gameplay. Not that MGS4 had much gameplay, and LBP is admittedly only as fun as you can make it, which for people without a lot of creativity isn't saying much.

Isn't MGS4 a semi-interactive movie?

 

[SaintWaldo]

Why do we keep letting Valve repeat the same quote over and over? Is their obvious embarrassment at not being able to tackle something that EVERYONE ELSE in the industry seems to be handling just fine? Methinks they protest too much. And too often. And press folks keep printing the same complaint without pointing out the Valve are the only asshats repeatedly complaining and making the same excuses. Everyone else did their professed job and figured out how to program the damn thing.

It is not news that Valve thinks the PS3 is hard, and the same words coming from a different employee strikes me as a thin reason to dig up the same old quotes from 3 years ago. I wish the industry would find a REAL damn story instead of rehashing the same old crap.

 

[DRADIS C0ntact]

"The complexity of the PlayStation 3 hinders quality game development."

I don't agree with that statement. Uncharted was one of the best games I've played on a console in years. Developers can obviously make great games when they desire to do so. What the guys at Valve should say is this - "The complexity of the Playstation 3 hinders us from developing quality games." It doesn't bother me either way. I've always preferred Valve games on the PC. They never felt right on a console to me.