Gabe humps the PS3

So Gabe Newell of Valve Software (HL2, Portal, Left4Dead) announced at E3 that they will be developing for the PS3. This does not come to much surprise to me, but the content of the announcement did. He mentioned that the PS3 is "the most open console" and will be developing Steamworks on it. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Steam (you been living inside a whale all your life?), Steam is a online distribution service for the PC and also serves as Valves online multiplayer platform. But what has peaked my interest? well not the ability to download games or view pretty trailers. It is the multiplayer and the technology behind it. Could we see finally see a true cross platform system to allow PC gamers on Steam and PS3 players to finally go head to head?. Here is what he had to say.

"We're a huge fan of open platforms in general," Valve's Erik Johnson told CVG today. "That's something that we feel like is the right thing for customers. The PS3 looks like the most open of the consoles right now.

"Fundamentally, we want all of our customers to be able to interact with each other - especially with a game like Portal 2, where people want to tell each other about Portal and have fun together.

"The work we're going to do on Steam [on PS3], feature-by-feature, we don't know exactly what that's going to look like today. But we want to create that same kind of thing on PS3 [as we have on PC] - where people can talk to each other, know what they've played."

"In terms of timing, it was a while ago. The thing for us that made it make the most sense was talking to [Sony] about Steam.

"We shipped Team Fortress 2 on PC and the Xbox. We shipped over 120 updates on the PC and we've shipped less than five on the Xbox. That's something that we feel like we've done a pretty poor job on and we don't know how to fix it.

"There's problems with shipping that many updates on the 360. For us, we kind of need to solve a problem with PS3 customers and hopefully Portal 2 does it.

"We want to make sure we're doing it right and they're gettin the kind of value we like to provide to our customers. We're not interested in giving them a less than stellar experience."

So I will leave you to draw your own conclusions to this information, if you have read my previous post about cross platform gaming then you will understand my excitement. I am not holding my breath for such a feature, but one can dream oh yes one can dream.