After years of Valve’s Gabe Newell bad-mouthing the PlayStation 3 for it complexity, even going as far as calling it a “total disaster”, some members of Valve have recently spoken up about their PS3 ambitions, saying “before we do anything on the PS3 we need to be able to support it in the right way”.
More recently, Valve apologized to PS3 owners admitting they “didn’t put their best foot forward with the PS3 community”, adding “we want to give PS3 owners the best possible PS3 experience”.
What better way to give PS3 owners such an experience than by tapping into the talent of one developer that surely has a firm grasp at what it takes to make a great PS3 game. That developer is Naughty Dog, creators of the award-winning Uncharted franchise.
While perusing the profiles of Valve employees on LinkedIn, you’ll notice that a few of them are ex-employees of Naughty Dog. Two of these profiles show ex-Naughty Dog employees with direct experience working on the PS3. Though, I’ll be quick to point out that these employees have been working at Valve for as many as 3 years now.
Vitaliy Genkin, an ex-senior programmer for Naughty Dog, reveals his work creating an ” in-game-editor with PS3 run-time support” along with ” different tools for defining / processing / optimizing in-game data”.
Another profile, for Alex Vlachos lists his work on Uncharted: Drakes Fortune.
That’s not the only ex-Naughty Dog employees Valve has brought under their wing. Elan Ruskin worked with Naughty Dog on the Jak and Daxter series.
With Valve having scooped up some serious PS3 programming talent, they should have no issues ridding themselves of the stigma that Valve just can’t handle the PS3.
[UPDATE] To clarify, we never claimed this is something that just happened. As blatantly stated within each LinkedIn profile, these employees were hired by Valve years ago. We were only stating that previous Naughty Dog employees are now working at Valve. We also speculated that this could mean Valve should have an easier time with the PS3 architecture. Nothing more.
Many sources following up on this article made it seem as though Valve was intentionally “stealing” Naughty Dog employees. That is not at all the case.
I’d like to apologize sincerely to Naughty Dog for running this story. I never expected my words to be twisted they way they have been.
Thanks to Kendrick for the tip!
