Why Portal 2 doesn't support PS Move

Last week Valve's brain-bending first-person puzzler Portal 2 had PlayStation Move support. It was a story that set the internet alight – Valve superstar writer Chet Faliszek had told the German PlayStation Blog Portal 2 would have "complete PlayStation Move support", although the feature "isn't fully integrated yet".

But it wasn't true. It wasn't even remotely true. The truth, in fact, was the complete opposite. Valve notified Eurogamer soon after publication to tell us so. Portal 2: no support for Move. "This quote was 'lost in translation'," Valve said.

We checked. We double checked. Eurogamer's translation of Chet's words on the German PlayStation Blog was sound. And the quotes were so specific. So what happened?

This afternoon, speaking to Eurogamer, Faliszek said it was a case of "mistranslation" not of German to English, but of English to German.

"Their translation from me to them, they may have not spoken that well," he said. "I don't speak that well of English to begin with! Who knows!"

So why doesn't Portal 2 support PlayStation Move?

"On the PC version we have the Hydra controller," Faliszek explained. "Those guys actually sit in our office. They've been working in our office for nine months, a year. So it's not something we'd trivialise and say, 'oh well, let's just toss this in, it doesn't need any thought or anything special.' They've been working in that way for that. We think it deserves that kind of respect if we're going to do it.

"We've always looked at Portal 2 as being the controllers we have going in and then the Hyrda. We designed for those things."

But what of the future? After Portal 2 launches in April, will Valve patch in Move support?

"Who knows?" Faliszek replied.

"I'm not sure it would make the game better. Obviously there are a bunch of games the Kinect and the Move absolutely made better and are for. But for this, where we had started from day one not thinking about that, it would not.

"The Hydra stuff, those guys have invented new puzzles to make their thing make sense. They've done the work to make it fit in and not be just this light touch on the top."