GOONL!NE

Since this gen kicked off, one developer has been a big absence on the PS3: Valve, and they wont pull no punches about it, PS3 is not for them, at least for now.

Doug Lombardi, head of PR at Valve, has said to CVG during a Left 4 Dead 2 event in London that they are looking for development teams for PLAYSTATION 3 development, but as it stands, they wont be bringing any more games to the system as it stands.

I think I’d use a little bit of the same answers. 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?

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.

More after the break.

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. And with Left 4 Dead, you’re getting the same DLC with the survival pack and some of the stuff that we have coming.

Until we have the ability to get a PS3 team together, until we find the people who want to come to Valve or who are at Valve who want to work on that, I don’t really see us moving to that platform.

We’ve kind of learned a lesson in that again, if we were customers of that product on PlayStation, we’d feel like we sort of got the stepchild version of the product while the guys on the PC and the 360 got the sweet version of it.

In 2007, Valve released The Orange Box on the Xbox 360 and PLAYSTATION 3, but EA did a direct port of the PS3 version, which came out a month after the 360 version, compared to the 360 Orange Box which was done directly by Valve. But before the release of The Orange Box, Valve’s co-founder Gabe Newell said the console was “a total disaster on so many levels”.

Most recently, there has been chatter of Left 4 Dead 1 and Left 4 Dead 2 coming to the PS3, but these have been shot down, although Lombardi has said in the past that if EA wants to do a port for the PS3 version, they would look at it.

Left 4 Dead 2 is out in the US on November 17th on the Xbox 360. We assume the UK and EU date will be 3 days later, November 20th, but we will ask EA about that next week.