Next Generation Publishes Edge article..."Edge: What’s next for Steam?

GN: We’ve spent the last year working hard to provide great tools for software developers and game publishers. I think that’s why we’ve seen this big increase. They’re like, 'Wow! I can see how my product sold China; I can see what the effects are of game-passes and free weekends on my sales'. Those are the kind of things that appeal to those on the developer side. Now we need to shift our focus on developing our tools for the gamers themselves. So the community stuff is the first step increasing its value – we really don’t want people to think of Steam as this glorified advertising bit-grouper. We want to make it more useful. Even if I never buy a game off Steam I want it to be useful.

Edge: Do you feel that maybe this has come too late – that you missed the point at which you could have monopolised the digital distribution market?

GN: I’m far more concerned about the fact that you can’t mod Steam – that worries me a lot more than other companies doing digital distribution.

Edge: Going back to thinking about different platforms, we notice that you aren’t developing the PS3 version of The Orange Box in-house. Do you have some horror stories to share?

GN: I think the people who have The Orange Box on the PS3 are going to be happy with their game experience. We’ve done the PC and 360 versions here and EA has a team doing the PS3 version – and they’ll make the PS3 version a good product; EA got the job done in putting a lot of people with PS3 experience on the project. But I think it’s harder to get it to the same standard as the 360 and PC versions.

Edge: Obviously you’ve ported games between platforms before, but is there anything you’ve learned from developing for multiple platforms from the outset?

GN: We’ve learned that you can create a framework where all you need to do is recompile for each of those three platforms. You know, that’s a sort of abstraction of our goal. With The Orange Box we could do that, so getting Left 4 Dead up on the 360 was like a day’s worth of work. It requires a big technology investment to be able to do that. I was pretty sceptical that we would; I thought there was going to be more work than that. I think in the longer term we’ll have the PS3 as well, but, to be honest, the biggest hole for us right now is the Wii.

Edge: A while ago you said that you thought Sony should do a 'do-over' with PS3. Do you still think that?

GN: Absolutely. I think [PS3 is] a waste of everybody’s time. Investing in the Cell, investing in the SPE gives you no long-term benefits. There’s nothing there that you’re going to apply to anything else. You’re not going to gain anything except a hatred of the architecture they’ve created. I don’t think they’re going to make money off their box. I don’t think it’s a good solution.

Edge: You’ve been very vocal about PS3’s failings, but it wasn’t that long ago that you were laying into Microsoft for its decision to go multicore with Xbox 360. Has your opinion changed?

GN: There’s something deeper going on here that’s important. Essentially Intel, about the time they were talking about the 10GHz Pentium 4, were focused on clockspeed over everything. They thought single thread of execution was the way to go. And because of that, processor scaling was not increasing linearly with transistors – it was sort of the square root: if you quadrupled the number of transistors you were only doubling the components of the CPU. The problem they ran into there were thermal issues. They weren’t able to manage heat. They weren’t going to be able to reach 10GHz without doing Freon cooling or something like that.

At the same time the GPU guys were essentially writing CPUs – there’s no real difference, the GPU is just a CPU with a specific function: it runs graphics code. They were going in this different direction; they weren’t trying to run it at incredibly high clock rates, they just had lots and lots of execution units – lots of cores, essentially. And Intel, because it could just throw tens of billions of dollars at its processor technology, was able to get a lot further with the single-thread direction than anyone else – but even they eventually said, 'We have to throw away this single thread of execution model. We have to go to multiple – we have to make this a software problem'.

Performance and scaling has stopped being a hardware problem and instead it’s been turned into a software problem. That’s bad news for us software guys – but for hardware it’s good news, because it shifts the value proposition towards software developers. What it also means is clock rates will stay pretty much the same, but the number of execution units you have is going to explode. The good news is that we’re going to spend an era of growing linearly for a while, so transistor budgets will translate directly to improvements.

At that point we said, we understand we have to make these investments in multi-core. We have to worry about not just two cores, but 64 threads; 512 threads – how are we going to reorganise it? What does that look like? But the more we look at it, the more excited we get. This current era is one of heterogeneous computing: you’ve got this one big chunk of code doing physics and AI, character animation and facial systems talking through this strange interface called DirectX to another chunk of your code which you write to run on GPUs. That’s just going to go away. And either Nvidia or Intel is going to win the battle for whose array of cores is taken up.

So that’s the backdrop behind us making these investments in multicore. Once you’ve made that decision, then adapting it to the 360 is fine, but we wouldn’t have made this investment if it were just to garner those benefits for the 360 – it’s because of the current and future investments on Intel’s side that we can get really excited about it, because that’s where AI and physics are going to experience the rapid performance increase that we’ve been seeing over the last several years exclusively reserved for 3D graphics. You look at how fast Nvidia and ATI have been increasing graphics performance in the last ten years – that’s how much faster our physics and AI are going to improve.

Edge: What’s the timescale for this boom?

GN: We’re going to start seeing it now. We’re going to be releasing multicore versions of Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat and Half-Life 2 after we ship The Orange Box. The challenge is going to be going forward. Right now we just have to deal with an order of magnitude of difference between DirectX 9 and DirectX 7 in terms of fill-rate and number of polygons. That’s a set of scaling issues that we’ve managed to adapt to. Soon we will have to answer the question of how do you design a game experience that could go from ten characters on screen to 1,000 characters on the screen. And how do you turn that into something worth purchasing? Is having 100 persons on the screen really ten times as fun as having just ten people on the screen?

In 2008 and 2009 we’re going to do stuff that’s optimised for the new high-end that doesn’t scale down, and use Steam to reach those customers, so we can start to learn what to do with 1,000 smart creatures on the screen at once. Then hopefully we can backfill and do more scaleable experiences.

Edge: You’ve more or less already placed your cards on the table about this, but what do you make of discrete physics cards, like Ageia’s PhysX?

GN: I think that’s a horrible idea. At the same time that the distinction between the GPU and CPU is going away the PPU guys want to come in and define a new set of abstractions, where we have memory and data that’s really far away from the CPU and CPU... How do I tell when something breaks, or gets pushed by a monster? All these decisions I have on my CPU have to sit around until they are resolved on the PPU and GPU, and you end up with a physics decelerator. This is the reason you want a homogenous architecture.

Edge: Does Valve consider itself a technology company, and how do you feel the Source engine stacks up with the other middleware engines out there?

GN: If something’s useful to us, we always ask how we can make it useful to other people, too. That’s always going to be part of what we do. Right now I think we’re really happy that if you want to ship a massmarket game that looks great on the high-end and runs acceptably on the low-end then we’ve got the best engine out there. So, for our purposes, we’re super-happy with it."