I’ve always thought of Valve as a PC-oriented company, and I think there’s a lot of truth to it. Though Newell’s comments sound pretty incendiary, I have always gotten the feeling that Valve simply tolerates the Xbox 360. He’s made it clear in past interviews that he believes consoles are incredibly inferior to the PC, which is why Valve will not release the Team Fortress 2 updates to consoles. I think that the reason Valve ports games to the Xbox 360 is because coding for that system is very similar to the PC.

I think it’s very clear that his business strategy isn’t about personal vendettas. Valve may not be working on the PS3, but they’re not working to better understand the Xbox 360 either. It’s all about how easy it is to port over.

Great post! Really makes you wonder what their real reasons are and why they seem to have such a disdain for the Sony platform. And I doubt very seriously if they’d have this opinion if Sony were in the lead.

But that’s the appeal of Microsoft: they’re giving developers easy tools to make games easily. That should sound like a good thing but how does it really stretch the imagination of the developers to push the hardware and software alike to deliver something no one’s ever seen before. If the PS3 was really that much of a dog to program for games like Killlzone, Uncharted 2, Heavenly Sword, MGS4 and many others wouldn’t be possible.

In the end it doesn’t really matter. The PS3 continues to survive without Valve’s games and chances are it’ll still do well without any Valve games in the future. But then again, I’m not a Half-Life fan so for me it’s less of an issue than it might be for Valve fans.