Valve’s Gabe Newell takes a question from Game Informer about the PS3 and just blatantly starts talking about the Wii instead. Lovely.
GI: Do you think from now on you’ll keep outsourcing PS3 projects [ed: Orange Box for PS3 is being done by EA], or will you start bringing those projects in house?
Newell: I think we’ll bring them in house more for licensees issues than our own. Just for our own priorities, that puts the Wii at a much higher priority at understanding that. I think the Wii represents more of a challenge because of its input. You can think of the Xbox 360 as pretty much a PC and a PlayStation as kind of a PC. The Wii gives you a bunch of problems that don’t fit into that model. You can’t think of it as graphics, CPU, texture bandwith scaling, you have to think of it as more fundamentally, and I think it’s more valuable. I think it’s more interesting than just graphics chip ”“ CPU combination. It’s the machine I have at home. The fact that we don’t have anything in development on it even though it represents big opportunities as a whole, it’s an obvious hole in our strategy.
An obvious hole. I imagine there are many, many third party players out there with a similar mindset right now. It’s too early to say things will change dramatically, say, tomorrow, but in 2008? watch out.