The co-founder and managing director of Valve, Gabe Newell, gave a small interview at this year’s Casual Connect video game conference and it wasn’t pretty! When addressing Valve’s interest in developing games and services for Linux, he came out with some pretty rough criticism of Windows 8:
“I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space. I think we’ll lose some of the top-tier PC/OEMs, who will exit the market. I think margins will be destroyed for a bunch of people. If that’s true, then it will be good to have alternatives to hedge against that eventuality.”
Gabe is not the only big name Windows 8 skeptic, however. The executive vice president of game design at Blizzard Entertainment, Rob Pardo, seems to agree with his sentiments:
“nice interview with Gabe Newell – “I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space* – not awesome for Blizzard either”
Sounds bad, but perhaps it’s still too early to make any serious judgements. Gaben has been very vocal about his criticisms of different platforms in the past, calling the Playstation 3 “a waste of everyone’s time”, for example. He did warm up to the console later on, releasing a Steamworks supported PS3 version of Portal 2. There’s definitely hope for Windows 8 still, as long as Microsoft takes heed of the criticism.
Don’t worry, Gabe! We still love you!
Source: AllThingsD.com, Twitter, Daily Tech
