Gabe Newell elaborates on Wii thoughts

A week or two ago, we posted a quick tidbit from Gabe Newell (Half-Life, Steam client, Valve) where he mentioned what he thought about the Wii. Now in an interview with CVG, Mr. Newell expanded on those thoughts.

CVG: What’s your take on next-gen platforms? You’ve always been primarily a PC games company.

Gabe Newell: The PC is going to continue to be our primary focus. It gives us a lot of advantages as a development platform, and it also forces us to confront a bunch of issues, like for us it’s very important to work well on older hardware and also take full advantage of new hardware. So the DX7 generation is much slower than the next-gen hardware, but DX10 is actually going to be more advanced than either the Xbox 360 or PS3.

For us, the Xbox 360 and the PS3 are challenges for designing a system so that it is as simple as possible for publishing simultaneously on all three platforms. The Wii is more of a challenge because of its input - that’s something that we’re going to have to work harder to understand. It’s easier to think of the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 as things that live within the flexibility you already have to think of on the PC side. And the Wii is the thing that is both furthest outside and most exciting, because of the controller. I have to say that we don’t understand how to take advantage of that yet. We think there’s a lot of potential there, and our respect for Nintendo goes up a notch, as they’re the ones who are doing the things that are disruptive and exciting.

Sounds like a positive opinion to me. It at least lets us know that Valve is indeed trying to wrap their minds around how to use the Wii.