I’m going to start by telling you what this post isn’t about. It isn’t about the latest anti-PS3 comments from Valve’s Gabe Newell, where he’s said that Valve aren’t on the PS3 because it’s a closed system like the GameCube, not an open system like the Mac. (See after the gallery below for Gabe’s full comment.)
Okay Gabe, we know Valve are a PC developer. You’re on Macs because if you scrub the Apple logo off them and crack them open they are PCs these days, same CPUs and GPUs. And your games are on the 360 because it’s really just a DirectXbox. The 360 isn’t any more ‘open’ than the PS3, in fact until recently, if anything, the PS3 was more open. I mean, come on, I bet you hate candles too, what’s wrong with you! Thanks for the free copy of Portal though.
And Mac’s aren’t open. Not unless you use Boot Camp or something similar to open them up as far as you can by installing Windows. Apple doesn’t want an open ecosystem on its devices, it wants you tied to its revenue generating iTunes platform. Apple wants you to fill your Apple devices with content bought from Apple. It would be like Valve delivering their games over a digital platform of their own making that they have sole control over. Oh wait, now I understand the synergy you guys feel with Apple.
I get the way you target your development platforms; if it looks like a duck (Mac) and quacks like a duck (Xbox) it is a duck (PC). Unfortunately for us PS3 gamers there is no implementation of DirectX on the PS3 as Microsoft and Sony don’t seem up for that for some reason. But now you are coding and porting your games to the Mac, you’re having to use OpenGL aren’t you? And I’m sure that somebody, somewhere must be cooking up a game engine for the PS3 that supports OpenGL, if there isn’t already one in existence. So Valve titles on PS3, never say never, right?
Okay, mini-rant over with. Had to get one in as we don’t want Katy thinking she’s got exclusivity on rants around here do we. Though I have to admit her rants are better mine, but don’t let her know I said that.
What this post is about is answering the important question of how cool would a PS3-shaped office building look if one was built in the heart of Berlin. Frigging awesomely cool, that’s how cool. The French magazine Amusement has published CGI shots of buildings shaped like a PS3, DS Lite and NES. Of course, the PS3 one looks the best. The best fictions are always based on reality so as a bonus I’ve included a picture showing the curved building on the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin that the PS3 building was based on.
Gabe Newell was taking part in Dan Benjamin’s The Conversation alongside Valve developer Jason Mitchell and John Siracusa of Ars Technica. The following is a transcript of a few minutes at around the 44 minute mark. There is a lot of good and interesting stuff in the hour-long talk (graphics are a solved problem apparently) and it is well worth a listen if you have got the time and have at least a passing interest in Valve and Steam.
John Siracusa: “[I would find it hard to pitch the Mac to you as a platform for Steam.] If I had to make the same pitch for the PS3, I’d say, well PS3 people obviously want to play games and there are far more of them out there that are game capable than there are Macs, especially a few years ago with the graphics hardware Apple was shipping. So it’s kind of a surprise to me that of those two platforms, it seems to me that the business case, at least, without the intangibles, is stronger for the PS3 than for the Mac. But I’m wondering if it comes down to a little bit of, you know, the intangibles, like do you guys own Macs? Do you use Macs? Do you like Apple products? Does that factor at all in the decision of where shall we port our games?”
Gabe Newell: “No… the first computer I ever used professionally back in 1983 was a 128K, single-floppy Mac… so as individuals we all have history with Apple and Macintosh products. But the point that I would make is that platform investments like the Mac… reengineering source to take advantage of OS X and getting Steam running on that, you’re sort of trying to fire a bullet five years into the future. And the question is… what investments are we making that are gonna get us closer to where we see ourselves going. We really think that open architecture platforms are going to be the critical determinants of how you create value for developers.
“World of Warcraft looks a lot more like the killer apps of the future than Uncharted 2 does. Uncharted 2, awesome game, great game, but World of Warcraft has a whole constellation of customer capabilities that [Uncharted 2] doesn’t, so we need to be targeting platforms that do a better job of supporting that kind of application and those sorts of gaming platforms. So if you say here’s an investment we can make, the Mac looks a lot closer to where we’re going to be a couple of years from now, so it makes more sense to make those investments.
“But it would be super awesome if Sony continues to move in the direction of making the PS3 a more open, you know look more like a Mac and less like a GameCube, if you want to just pick two points on a constellation, then it certainly becomes easier to justify investments there. …We have this construct of what platforms are going to look like in the future and it’s really driven out of entertainment as a service, as a sort of encapsulated slogan, which I usually hate those sort of things but we use it as shorthand internally. The platforms that do the best job of enabling that, of proximity between customers and developers, of service creation and service value for customers, and the Mac looks a lot like that, a lot closer than today’s consoles. So it’s easier to justify investments there for the long run.”
