Homer Simpson once said, “You tried your best and failed miserably. The lesson is: never try.” Valve must take that second part—“never try”—pretty seriously, since it told some dude at E3 that it has no interest in developing for the PS3. Reason being? It’s too hard. Fair enough.
The full quote, straight from a Valve dev on the E3 show floor:
The PC and the 360 are just more straightforward. 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.
Sounds reasonable to me. If Valve can sustain itself developing only for the PC and Xbox 360, why should it knock itself out trying to figure out how to develop for the PS3? It quite literally is not worth the effort.
It’s not my business to tell Valve what to do with its resources, said with an eye toward the ongoing “controversy” regarding Left 4 Dead 2.