Eidos May Have Set Bad PS3 Precedent

Ars Technica opines on Eidos' decision to hold off on PS3 games until 2008. Though they make a point of mentioning all of the great steps forward Sony and the PS3 have taken in the last month or so (LittleBigPlanet, Home, the EU launch), they feel this decision may have ramifications for the console. "Though Eidos isn't the most prominent European developer--noteworthy releases for 2006 included the surprisingly decent Just Cause, Tomb Raider: Legend and Hitman: Blood Money--this may set a dangerous precedent for other developers. If Sony doesn't step up to become more proactive at keeping the flow of good games steady, the installed base may not continue to grow quickly enough and developers may begin to pull support, creating a lack of games. This vicious cycle is hard to escape, as Sony has previously learned with the PSP's port problem."

Comments

Re:Maybe by then the tools will be finished

[Dutch Gun]

"but it's hard to develop for..." yeah, yeah. The developers always complained about this, but it was never an issue for the PS1 and PS2, despite the competition having better hardware and better development tools than Sony.

Of course, once games started selling a million copies, the developers got oddly quiet about how "difficult" it was to deal with the PS' architecture... Just because the developers figured it out doesn't mean it wasn't a bitch at the time. I was fortunate to jump to console development fairly late in the PS2 life cycle when most of the tools had matured quite a bit, but I knew a few folks that developed release titles, and so had the toughest time. Our company's engine was cross-platform among Xbox, GC, and PS2. Easily 90% of the optimization work was done on the PS2 version of the engine, trying to get it up to speed with the other two consoles.

One thing many people don't realize is that the PS2 is largely a to-the-metal programming job. Abstraction in the OS is pretty minimal, unlike the Xbox and GC APIs (which are DirectX and OpenGL derivatives, respectively). Early PS2 developers were writing vector unit programs in a custom assembly language (custom C compilers came later). Threaded programming is pretty tough to do in the best cases, but threaded programming in assembly on custom hardware interfacing with C/C++ code with minimal documentation (early docs were all Japanse) and scant samples? Yeah, that's pretty damn hard.

The fact of the matter is that the toughest job for developers is very early in the console's life cycle - constantly changing APIs and hardware revs, poor documentation, lack of mature tool support, etc. The reason you heard developers get "oddly quiet" is because things eventually get figured out and better supported, and they moved on to bigger and better things.

Sony is forcing them to do this

[megalomaniacs4u]

According to a friend who works for Eidos: Sony want games that aren't ports and eidos specialises in simultaneous multi-console releases (sometimes with crap PC ports).

So:

• Sony don't like this - they want exclusives.
• If they can't get exclusives they want the best version which is difficult as the PS3 graphic capability is currently on par with the Xbox360

So basically Sony have shot themselves in the foot with their ridiculous pricing and then they proceed to blow their (few remaining) brains out of their arse.

Re:PSP problem?

[Wdomburg]

The original poster alluded to a "port problem" - hardware sales and software ports are two completely different things.

Launch sales can also be deceiving. Fast forward two months and PSP sales sagged below both the DS and the Gameboy Advance SP.