What exactly is the deal with The Orange Box?

Short answer. When you have built up a sucessful culture it becomes easier to use your influence to get things your way than it is to knuckle-down and innovate. Material reward is no longer linked to hard work. Once upon a time, companies like EA or Valve would bend over backwards to do what needed to be done. Now it's all too much bother for them. Bring on the start-up developers, I say. Show them what good old-fashioned American initiative looks like.

There are a few prevailing theories out there, here are mine:

Newell is just shortsighted; he's completely written off the PS3 (openly burning all bridges with Sony in the process) and thinks he will only make a substantial profit on 360 (he can't be bothered with taking a smaller profit to grow the loyalty and trust of the user base for PS3), so no future work on it with his team.

Newell is an ex Microsoft hack. He's taken a nice payoff from his "buddies" at MS to neglect any real work on the PS3 and possibly to openly degrade the PS3 and all their future efforts. MS has been known to payoff it's partners; it payed off Paramount $150 mil (I believe) for a limited time period of exclusivity.

He genuinely doesn't have the resources in his team to learn to program on the PS3. The PC is much closer in architecture to the 360. Porting to the 360 from the PC is presumably much less painful then porting from the PC to the PS3. Instead of fessing up to this inadequacy, his "flight or fight" instincts kick in and he rants about how the PS3 sucks etc, etc, insert foot in mouth.

In any case you can pretty much count on the fact that any Valve product for PS3 from this point forward will suck hard.

MS paid off Paramount? For what exactly?digitalgidget

There was a bit of misinformation in that post. Toshiba (owns HD-DVD) signed an exclusivity deal with Paramount so that their movies would only appear on the HD-DVD format. Its like how Sony signed a deal with Blockbuster so that they will only carry Blu-ray. Or like how EA signed a deal with the NFL so that only they could develop NFL video games. Also, that deal was with Toshiba, not Microsoft, although MS benefits because they have also partnered with Toshiba.

http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/home_av/others/0,39037627,62031220,00.htm

It was Paramount and Dreamworks for HD-DVD exclusivity.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/21/technology/21disney.html?fta=y