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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."
Sony really needs to get in gear. Playstation HOME and LittleBigPlanet were a *Start*. They need more announcements of top tier exclusives, not defection and waffling on the part of developers.
Mass market HD video is a very dangerous thing to bet on. Most people are not videophiles. DVD is "good 'nuff" for the majority of people. Communicating the benefit of ever escalating resolutions when most consumers are still squinting at a 25" to 30" screen from 8' to 10' is really, really hard. Big Screens just don't have the market penetration to make HD an easy sell, and if the people backing the HD formats don't watch it, DVD and digital distribution may eat their lunch before breakfast time.
The problem is that the PS3 had the same problems the PS2 had in terms of difficulty to develop for.
Actually, no. On the PS2 and its predecessors, the wierd hardware was mostly devoted to graphics. On the PS3, the graphics hardware is relatively conventional; there's an NVidia GPU inside. It's the non-graphics part of the machine that's non-conventional. This is new in consoles.
Worse, the wierd hardware didn't make it cheaper. Which is the killer. Always before, the wierd hardware on game consoles has been there because you couldn't get equivalent price/performance with conventional hardware.
This wasn't Sony's intent. The original plan for the PS3 was that the Cell processors would do the graphics work. If you see IBM demos of the Cell processor, they actually show it doing graphics. But it didn't really work out. Without enough memory per Cell CPU for a frame buffer, let alone texture maps, the graphics pipeline mapped badly to the Cell architecture. So Sony had to add in an NVidia GPU, which pushed costs up and slipped the schedule.
The Cell concept isn't all that bad, but it needs maybe 16MB per CPU to get programmers out of the streaming straitjacket.
Early in the Cell life-cycle, I went to a talk at Stanford given by IBM's architect for the thing. There was kind of a "build it and they will come" attitude - he didn't know how to use the thing effectively, but that was someone else's problem. That's always a bad sign. Years ago, I went to a talk by a lead Itanium guy, and he said much the same thing - it requires a near-omniscient compiler to get the scheduling right, and they hadn't been able to develop one yet, but he was confident someone would.
Both the Cell and the Itanium share the property that they make it easier to design the chip by pushing work onto the compiler people. That's usually not a good sign. On the other hand, if you let programmers design the CPU, you get something like a VAX, which has a clean, easy-to-program instruction set that could never be made to run fast. Amazingly, x86 is actually a good compromise.