EA Partners boss David deMartini has commented about the “challenging situation” of porting a Valve game to the PS3. Specifically referring to EA UK’s work on The Orange Box; a game which received a slightly lower aggregate score on Sony’s platform than its PC and 360 counterparts, deMartini also commented on Valve boss Gabe Newell’s infamous disparaging remarks about the PS3 as “unhelpful.”
“They have a focus on excellence. What they do with all their partners, is they hold us to that same standard. If you don’t reach it, they’re going to get a little prickly – and appropriately so.” he told C&VG. “If you can’t operate at that level as a publishing and distribution partner, you shouldn’t be participating with Valve. That’s their expectation. I view it as a continuing challenge to delight them,” he adds.
Regarding Valve’s discouraging comments that the PS3 was “a waste of everyone’s time” during the development period of the game, the EA Manager said:
We were trying to do parallel development. Valve hadn’t been on PS3 and they had made some statements about the platform which didn’t exactly help. It really was a challenge situation.
In closing, deMartini is somewhat sceptical of future EA porting arrangements with the developer, all but scuppering previous chatter about possible Valve titles appearing on the PS3 hailing from EA’s development teams. He reckons that, going forward, Valve will likely cater to this user-base themselves.
”I don’t know if we’d do another situation where we’d be doing one of the platforms and they’d be doing the other platform. But it very well could be that the PS3 is coming of age enough so that they would develop on it. I don’t know that, but I think gamers can take it that where there are substantial platforms, Valve is certainly going to be on those platforms.”
Source: C&VG