OnLive says Valve “really like”… OnLive

Streaming games service OnLive is reportedly making friends in the industry, especially with developing giants Valve.

This news comes from the mouth of OnLive VP of Engineering Joe Bentley. Speaking about the Portal developers, he told CVG: “Gabe and his team really like what we’re doing. I can’t go into specifics of any conversations we’ve had but we have had conversations with everybody in the industry. They really dig OnLive. Gabe is a funny guy because he’s really not competitive – very similar to Randy [Pitchford]. He sees us a complementary in a lot of different ways.”

Even though they have their different hooks, one would assume services like OnLive and Steam to be rivals. “If you get to know Valve as a company, Steam was something that they just had to do because nobody else was handling a decent digital distribution model,” Bentley added. “Gabe and his team’s hearts are really in making games like Portal 2 and so forth. If you see where Portal 2 is, it’s on every other platform.

“If Gabe was so intent on Steam’s dominance he would make it exclusive on Steam, but that’s not what he is. He’s about making the best quality games out there.

“He’s really fascinated with our features and given us a lot of suggestions, they’ve got similar features coming out and we’ve chatted about really innovative ideas. I regard him and the company as friends. Sure we’re going to have other people doing similar things, but the industry is big enough. We’re only a 200 person start-up, we don’t need to own it all, there’s something for everybody.”

But Bentley does know one place that Steam can’t compete with his service. “For me, Steam can’t really take their game to that mobile level… Gabe [Newell] walks around with his iPad so he sees OnLive and maybe thinks about how he can get Portal out to the world to the mobile market without compromises,” he said.

It’s always good to see companies getting along, innit?