Conflicting reports on Valve's future PS3 support

The same Valve employee expresses two conflicting reports on the developer's interest in supporting Sony's PlayStation 3.

Valve has been open about their opinions on PS3 development, resulting in their concentration on PCs and the PC-centric Xbox 360. The developer passed the task of porting the PS3 version of The Orange Box over to EA, with Valve claiming that the Xbox 360 and PC are just more straight forward.

Denying the PS3 support continued with Left 4 Dead and with the developer now working on its sequel, CVG asked Valve's Doug Lombardi about why the PS3 is still shunned.

"We look at it as if we were customers of this product, how would we want to be treated and what sort of product would we want out of it?" Lombardi told CVG.

"We've run a couple of experiments over the years of PlayStation in general; we did Half-Life on PS2 with an outside company and then we did Orange Box PS3 with an outside company. We weren't able to deliver the same type of product on PS3 and PS2 for that matter that we were on the 360 and PC.

"If you look at it as a matter of Valve doing it, Valve did the 360 and the PC version of the Orange Box and they both go 96 on Metacritic - The PS3 version was nowhere close to that. Left 4 Dead got a 89 or a 90 on 360 and PC.

"We're really, really proud of the fact that whatever platform you play the game on you're getting the same experience, you're getting the same Metacritic score."

However, Joystiq appears to have received a slightly different response, where Lombardi states that "we have to get people under our roof who are dedicated, talented PS3 guys and then all bets are off. We can take the same sort of strides and get the quality out of the box and offer the same support post-launch on that platform, as well."

When asked whether Valve is actively seeking PS3 developers, Lombardi told Joystiq:

"Valve is always looking to hire people. So yeah, definitely."

So what are we to think? Will Valve eventually start supporting the PS3?