In an article from Game Informer magazine, Valve's Gabe Newell has spoken frankly about Sony and the Playsation 3. Of course, Newell worked for Microsoft for 13 years so there may be an alternative motive behind his comments.

"The PS3 is a total disaster on so many levels, I think It’s really clear that Sony lost track of what customers and what developers wanted,"said Newell. "I’d say, even at this late date, they should just cancel it and do a ‘do over’. Just say, ‘This was a horrible disaster and we’re sorry and we’re going to stop selling this and stop trying to convince people to develop for it.’"

US Analysts, American Technology Research recently claimed that Sony aren't selling as many consoles as they claim, "Our channel checks yesterday of 52 retail stores, from boutiques to big-box retailers, showed that 28 of the 52 stores had PS3 consoles in stock, while none had Wii consoles in stock."

Sony has dismissed the claim that the PS3 is failing to sell in the US claiming that the high stock figures are due to the 'successful supply chain'. "It isn't because demand has weakened, it is because we have kept the supply pipeline moving, "said Sony's Dave Karraker.

The war of words on Sony's PS3 has been relentless ever since the console made its first outing at E3 on May 16th, 2005. Unfortunately for Sony, there are no signs of it slowing down with Bill Gates also making a statement to GamesIndustry.biz today where he said, "We wanted to be the guy with the small box that costs less. We wanted to have the most games. We wanted to play to our software strength, and tools and online.

"We wanted to swap positions with Sony. We wanted to not be a year late, not be a big box, not be a more expensive box. How are we doing on that?"

Referring specifically to the PS3, Gates took the opportunity to take a dig at the PS3 processors, saying "They were going to have the Cell be the video processor. But they didn't know what they were doing... They turned to Nvidia at the last minute, but Nvidia can't do embedded DRAM.

"Go look at the bandwidth problems... They took their year and burned it by not having a decent CPU strategy and then turning to Nvidia at the last minute. It's a very unusual thing. Those processors are isolated from each other."

More bitching to follow...