In an interview with Next-Gen.biz, Gabe Newell, the mastermind behind Half-Life 2, recently expressed disapproval in the upcoming console generation. At the top of his worries is the difficulty associated with developing for consoles that have multicore processors. "If writing in-order code [in terms of difficulty] is a one and writing out-of-order code is a four, then writing multicore code is a 10," stated Newell.
He was also considerably upset about the hype surrounding the PS3 and Xbox as well.
"Statements about 'Oh, the PS3 is going to be twice as fast as an Xbox 360' are totally meaningless . It means nothing. It's surprising that game customers don't realize how it treats them like idiots. The assumption is that you're going to swallow that kind of system, when in fact there's no code that has been run on both of those architectures that is anything close to a realistic proxy for game performance. So to make a statement like that, I'm worried for the customers. And that we view customers as complete morons that will never catch on and that we're lying to them all the time. That's a problem because in the long run, it will have an impact on our sales." - Gabe Newell
For more insight from Gabe Newall be sure to check out the full article at Next Generation.