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Gearbox president Randy Pitchford has once again fired a series of extraordinary criticisms towards fellow developer Valve, reports suggest.
Pitchford apparently likened Valve’s reluctance to develop for the PS3 to the trivialities of common fanboyism, before going on to imply that the success of Steam has blinded the Washington-based developer with arrogance.
“[Valve VP of marketing] Doug Lombardi had to take a swipe at the PS3 again, and I thought it was foolish,” offered Pitchford when speaking to UK game magazine OPM, as cited by news site AnalogHype.
“I read it the same way I read fanboys,” he added. “Like there’s a guy who brought the Sony platform and he’s a Sony guy, so he decides he’s going to spend a certain percentage of his time bashing Microsoft. And there’s a guy on Microsoft doing the same thing. Those guys are childish and narrow minded; It’s the same kind of thing.”
Numerous staff at Valve have in the past made criticisms of the PS3’s powerful yet complicated hardware – often as an explanation as to why the studio rarely releases its titles on Sony’s flagship console.
Pitchford’s newest condemnation of Valve follows his previous claim that Valve’s often-praised Steam service has a ‘conflict of interest.’
Now Pitchford has warned Valve that it shouldn’t lose sight of its reliance on other publishers.
“Valve think their own stuff is the only stuff that matters,” he said, “to the point where they have their own distribution platform.
“It’s like, I don’t care about retail, about Marketplace, or PSN, I’m going to have Steam. It’s cool, it’s good, and they’re doing a good job but at the same time they’re reliant on the rest of the world.
“They had to do that [Left 4 Dead] deal with EA. When I see the L4D ad on the television I don’t see a Valve logo, I see an EA logo, and when I bought it, I bought it at a store.”
