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

Careful with the Headlines

[AKAImBatman]

The actual article says "dangerous" precident, not "bad". In this particular case, there's a world of difference. This news may be "bad" for Sony et al, but it's actually quite "good" for the shareholders of these companies.

It's well known that the opening weeks of a game's release are the most important, as the period that follows causes the game to be overshadowed by competitors. If I were a shareholder in Eidos, I wouldn't want them releasing hot properties (e.g. Tomb Raider) to a system that can't sustain record or near-record sales in its opening week. Better to delay the games by a few months, then announce them to a much larger fan base.

Re:Careful with the Headlines

[j00r0m4nc3r]

You're right. It's not Eidos's responsibility to worry about Sony's bottom line or the success of their console. They only need to worry about their own shareholders. Sure, Eidos wants to sell software for Sony's hardware, but they would be just as happy to sell software to XB360 owners if the PS3 fails. It's also not Eidos's responsibility to worry about whether or not their business decisions will set a precedent for other publishers to follow. They make business decisions with their own bottom line in mind, NOT Sony's or any other publisher's.

This is precisely what we have been talking about.

[drinkypoo]

This is very much what we have been speculating about for weeks now. If Sony can't keep developers interested, then they can end up in serious trouble. One mid-rank games developer (as an aside, I remember when I would see Eidos' name in the intros and actually get excited) holding off for a year does not mean a whole lot - yet. But it may indeed be a sign of greater things to come.

The PS3 is an exciting system but it's looking more and more like Sony has reached too far in a variety of ways, not least the many indignities they've inflicted upon their customers over the last several months.

I'd have to say that the continued failings of HD-DVD and the success of Blu-Ray, inflated as it is by the media and certain individuals with an agenda to push, is looking like the only saving grace for the PS3. It remains to be seen if Blu-Ray is indeed going to win the HD video race; even if it does, can it save the PS3?

Maybe by then the tools will be finished

[Animats]

Remember, porting to the PS3 is a huge pain, because of the weird Cell architecture, with very limited memory per CPU. As the tools get better, the costs of porting decline. From a developer perspective, it makes sense to wait.

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.

Re:Maybe by then the tools will be finished

[Animats]

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.

All in the presentation?

[Kelbear]

Lots of games have been held back for a year. Usually because of development deadlines having to get pushed back for a year. It's a different reason here, but the same effect. If the PS3 does badly over the course of its lifespan I don't think people will look back at Eidos's announcement as a key event. It already comes after a succession of games going multi-platform, which may be bad for the console, but good for the gamers.

The problem between development and install base has been discussed pretty thoroughly.

The Wii has some pretty nice games out, but it has a similar gap in games coming up. Though there was much speculation on how good the Wii would be, it doesn't seem like anyone had bet on it being the success that it is. Nintendo included, in light of the tight supply. So while it seems that there are a lot of developers interested in making Wii games, they would have had to begin developing a year or more ago to have a chance at filling the upcoming gap. But at least the games will come someday.

I'm imagining a 33%-ish share for each console after 4 years.

Re:This is precisely what we have been talking abo

[Cadallin]

This isn't a "sign" of things to come. It's just another event in the continuing trail of tears that has been the PS3 launch. Sony has already lost several third party exclusives, to developers announcing they are going cross platform or even 360 exclusive. Sony has two real holds at the moment. The Blu-Ray/HD-DVD war is still very much undecided, and may swing in their favor. The other is Final Fantasy. Sony is hoping at this point that the launch of Final Fantasy XIII is going to sell 10-20 million PS3s. If *I* were head of Microsoft games division, I'd be offering Squeenix a deal, FFXIII goes cross platform, or 360 exclusive, and they get a blank check on which to write the biggest number they can think of. The rushing sound heard immediately afterward would be Sony's future swirling down the proverbial toilet bowl.

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.

Re:This is precisely what we have been talking abo

[7Prime]

Actually, seeing as though the GameCube is about twice as powerful as the PS2, not to mention that the hardware anti-aliasing made it look even more than that, an FF game on just the GameCube would be a huge step up. All people really care about is progress in graphics, and having the next FF game on the Wii would be exactly that, and by quite a bit. Actually, the differences between 8-12 have all been fairly minor, even the graphics of FF9 are not too far behind that of FFX. FF12 looked extremely glitchy, because the PS2 was fairly inferior, graphically, that an "overclocked GameCube" (of which the Wii is actually quite a bit more than just that), would be a huge sigh of relief. FF12 sold JUST FINE, just 6 months ago, on a system that was able to produce graphics that were about the quality of the GameCube's launch titles.

I think you underestimate the jRPG playing community, graphics are really not as important as you might think. This is a genre that began with text-based gameplay and progressed to sub-standard NES and SNES graphics, and on to extremely block and subpar 3D graphics (FF7 was a hit, but no one claimed that it was a graphical wonder). The important thing is immersion, and that comes from a host of things, but mostly: story, characters, writing, design, music... and yes, graphics. But the graphics of an overclocked gamecube would be more than suitable for the next release. You can bet that if it went to the Wii, people would snatch it up like you wouldn't believe, I don't think you'd hear much complaining. Remember that this is largely the same audience that snatched up Twilight Princess and, for the most part, absolutely loved it.

People remember the graphics of a game, mostly, for its most dazzling graphical moments... all of which are done with pre-rendered CG that will look identical on all consoles (under ED resolution). Snazzy real-time graphics are far more the baby of the FPS community than of the RPG playing community. After all, a lot of the time we're content being burried beneath menus, or reading text boxes, anyway. You're just putting way too much stock in it. Yes, an OverClocked GameCube will more than suffice.

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.