Sony Makes It Hard To Develop For the PS3 On Purpose

adeelarshad82 writes "CNet reports on a bizarre comment from Sony's Computer Entertainment CEO in response to complaints from developers on how hard it is to develop games for the Playstation 3. 'We don't provide the "easy to program for" console that (developers) want, because "easy to program for" means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is, what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?' Given that games heavily drive console sales, and the fact that the PS3 is already 8 million units behind the Xbox 360, I think making a developer's job harder is the last thing Sony needs."

Comments

Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Ballmer was absolutely correct in emphasizing the one thing that really matters for any platform.

Developers, Developers, Developers

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[telchine]

I think this is quite a valid strategy. It's liek Visual Basic, it turns application development into a drag and drop excercise. Anyone can do it, even people who don't really understand programming! However that results in Visual Basic getting a bad reputation because anything that's written by bad programmers is going to end up a bit shoddy. Sony don't want their console associated with shoddy games. They'd prefer that only decent programmers create games for their system.

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[BadAnalogyGuy]

That really isn't what Hirai said, though. If I'm interpreting his comment correctly, he is saying that he wants to see a progression in quality over the 10 year lifespan of the PS3. The first games will take little advantage of the HW, but as time goes on and developers become more acquainted with the platform they create games that take more advantage of those HW features.

It sounds like a post-release justification for a massive blunder.

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[Computershack]

The first games will take little advantage of the HW, but as time goes on and developers become more acquainted with the platform they create games that take more advantage of those HW features.

That's if they've not got sick of fighting the console and decided to put their development money elsewhere. Developing games costs a lot of money and there's not going to be many software houses happy about having to needlessly waste money on R&D just because Sony decide to make it deliberately hard in order to artificially prolong the life of a console.

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[commodore64_love]

Yeah but then you go to nintendo.com and you read the exact-opposite (quoted from memory): "We made the Nintendo 64 too difficult to develop games, and therefore they made the Gamecube easy to program." The Wii is probably extremely-easy, since it's essentially a Cube with some improved specs. Wii's at the top of the pile as the best-selling unit.

Previous #1 console: Were they easy to program relative to their competitors?

PS2 - no.
PS1 - yes.
SNES - no.
NES - yes.
Atari VCS - no.

I guess there's no real pattern there; it's rather random.

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[tixxit]

They did this same strategy with the PS2 and its emotion engine or whatever. I remember after about a year, hearing about how these first gen games still hadn't even used a good hunk of the PS2's power. Well, if you look at some of the games that came out over the next few years, I'd say they were right! And he is right, you are not really going to see a vast improvement in the games on the Xbox over the next years. Developers are already trying to max out the hardware. The PS3 may be tricky, but there is still huge room for improvement in games (and its not like they look bad already).

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[frieko]

Great. Or:

1. Make development easy
2. Deny publication rights for games that suck
3. ???
4. Profit!

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[Mascot]

"Real programmers" love Visual Basic. It enables them to fulfil their customers' requests a lot quicker. Rather than spending a week in C they can spend a few hours in VB. This means happier customers, and more revenue.

The only ones that think Visual Basic has a bad reputation are kids in bedrooms that think there's some inherent value in using the lowest level language available, rather than the right tool for the job. VB isn't by any means the right tool for all jobs, but it is the right one for quite a few.

As for the actual topic, I agree with the others that feel this was just a very poorly phrased way of saying the architecture makes it complicated, but that it will pay off in the end. Having said that, the Sony person seems to equate "powerful hardware" with "difficult to develop for". That seems ridiculous.

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[commodore64_love]

It's true that end-of-life games are more-advanced, but that doesn't do much good if you're in a distant 3rd place. Some of the best Atari 7800 ProSystem games were made in the 1990, 5 years after release, but who cares? By that point it was a distant 3rd place behind the Master System and NES. The A7800 was a flop because it was too hard to program for. Same with the Jaguar of the early 90s. Same with the Sega Saturn of the mid-90s.

Too hard to program for == failure to impress gamers == flop.

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[Dogtanian]

I don't see anything inherently wrong with using a visual programming environment if it's the right tool for the job and you aren't using it as a crutch for your lack of skill.

However, Visual BASIC, the specific language? Ugh.

I used to program in old-school BASIC, but haven't used it for years... now, used to languages with C-derived syntax, VB seems horribly clunky and not easy to use, as basically used to be (supposedly).

Basically, I'm guessing VB was originally designed for people who were familiar with BASIC because back then it was "easier" than hard languages like C (and probably wasn't being used for such major projects that its inappropriateness wasn't such a problem).

I'd guess that it then retained BASIC style syntax over the years because it's what they were used to, even if it was clunky and now no easier to learn from scratch than C-syntaxed OO languages like C# if you weren't "locked in" to the BASIC way of doing things.

Fortunately, VB finally seems to be dying with the advent of .Net. Perhaps given the third choice of C# (rather than just C++) for Windows development and faced with having to change much of their Classic VB code for the not-really-compatible VB.Net, they realised that VB's dated approach was more hassle than it was worth, even for a dyed-in-the-wool user?

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[Sparks23]

Except the PS2 was like this as well. (Albeit to a lesser degree.) Until later in the life-cycle, no one had really fully figured out what you could fully do with the hardware.

Speaking as someone who actually did work a bit on coding for the PS2 at a past job, my understanding is not that they /deliberately/ made the console difficult, but that they poured technology into the console without regard for saying 'this piece must be used in this way.' As such, people figured out their own paths (and innovated what was done on the platform).

In some ways, it's a valid strategy. PS2 games unquestionably got more advanced as people explored what they could do with the console's capabilities. (Granted, this understanding comes from other developers at the PS2 training seminar I went to, not officially from Sony themselves.)

Since different companies came up with different techniques (probably including some Sony didn't expect), there was some real variety in the games as well. But the PS2 was also the dominant console, hands down, and so developers were targeting that as their primary platform; they had the freedom to get into exploring the edges of the hardware and figuring out what they could do with future projects.

I suspect the same philosophy applies here. Not so much 'let's make it hard,' but 'let's put lots of power in this thing, and not provide guidance on any particular best way to use it all.' There's a sort of hacker beauty to 'there's no One Right Way, find your own.'

The issue this time around, of course, is that the Xbox 360 is 'good enough' for most gamers; even if the PS3 is more advanced, the 360 is a perfectly workable gaming platform and quite popular. Most major games need to release on both platforms, and so developers are generally not trying to innovate on the PS3 but just trying to take the same game and shoehorn it more or less equally onto both. And so the PS3's untapped potential becomes less a cool puzzle to figure out ('hey, look what I realized we can do!') and more of a higher bar to entry.

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[DavidTC]

The real question that Sony should ask themselves is if people are going to buy a 9 year-old console to play a cool game?

Or will they move over to MS's X-Box 720 or whatever and play the exact same game, along with a bunch of other games that came out at the same time as the 720 because, duh, it's easy to program for.

I mean, duh, the XBox itself is a counterexample of this. MS essentially walked into the marketplace because programming for the XBox was easy if the game had a Windows version. Ease of programming=more games and better games.

And Nintendo isn't giving a shit about 'utilizing hardware to the max', has essentially given up on building faster boxes, and has decided to build fun ones. (They have a point. Consoles really are fast enough to do essentially anything you want. Hell, my computer is fast enough to real-time near perfect 3D rendering.)

I have a feeling that Sony is trying to pull off a NES, where some of the best games for that came out years later, but has forgotten that a) There were very little competitors at the time, and b) A lot of that was the entire industry maturing.

(Before anyone think I'm being unfair, or if I'm just wrong about something, be aware I haven't had a console since the NES.)

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[hob42]

Maybe there is a pattern, though? NES->SNES was consumer momentum... PS1->PS2 the same... but notice the switches between vendors is from a no platform to a yes platform.

Just a thought.

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[LearnToSpell]

Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no... You don't see a pattern there?!

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[imboboage0]

MS essentially walked into the marketplace because programming for the XBox was easy if the game had a Windows version. Ease of programming=more games and better games.

Ouch. Yes, I'd say you are correct and I agree with you. Unfortunately, this has also resulted in games being programmed for the Xbox then ported to Windows. This leaves you with clunky interfaces and bugs that are nearly unbelieveable. One good example of this is GTA4. Designed with the Xbox in mind, it's been hell for anyone trying to run it under Windows.

This isn't to say that there isn't hope. I'm just hoping developers will start paying some attention and realize that a console UI isn't fit for computers and the amount of bugs is just unacceptable.

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[FithisUX]

The only hard thing, is the lack of expandability in terms of RAM.

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[Pharmboy]

It would seem that they also believe that the singular reason a game is "good" is related to the programmer's understanding of the hardware. This just isn't true. Plenty of games have nice graphics and a horrid storyline, or are pretty to look at but clunky to play. If programmers spent less time figuring out the hardware, perhaps they could spend more time working on plot, playability, and flow. Or you can be Sony and make excuses after the fact.

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[mabhatter654]

more musicians are funded as "studio players" that work 9-5 than as rock stars by a wide margin.

In the same way more programmers are out there paid to write "TPS report 2009" than are paid to write games or operating systems by an even wider margin. The customer is an internal middle manager that's going to decree what the product does, who uses it, and how much it costs.

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[MikeBabcock]

Its a good question with an answer already: PS2 the most played console of 2008.

Please note the PS2 still sold 410 thousand consoles in December of 2008. That's after already saturating the market with 43.6 million total sales.

At $100, you can't beat buying a PS2 as a gaming platform. In five years' time, Sony hopes the PS3 will be in the same position.

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[CastrTroy]

VB isn't dying with .Net. There's VB.Net, and it's still going strong. In a lot of cases it gets new features before C# does. VB.Net is still a very good languages. You may not like the syntax. but it's just syntax, and some people like it.

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[hairyfeet]

You wanna know why VB was a good language and popular? As someone who deals with SOHOs and SMBs I can tell you quite easily. It is because VB6 was(and to an extent still is) the engine that small businesses run on. Why? Because they ALWAYS have some funky ass little job that needs an easy to use program to fill that would just be too damned expensive to have written by some big software house. Let me give an example that sadly I can't seem to find where I put the code to anymore.

I was doing some work setting up the PCs for a junkyard/car repair shop. While there I noticed that they were always having to call a guy in or spend a lot of time pouring over these books. When I asked what they were doing they explained that they had 1000s of car and trucks spread out over 3 sites and would have trouble sometimes with finding where a particular make and model was or even if they had it. So I told them for $500 I could make that problem disappear by giving them a custom application that would track where the cars were. All they would have to do was input the data one time(or pay me an extra $200 to do it) and then add any new cars to the database. I promised that it would be simple to use and would show them mockups and customize it to their requirements. I cooked up a VB6 app linked to a database that would give them the choice of typing manually or using a pull down for make/model. Since they already labeled their lot by numbers such as B3, D4, etc it was trivial to have it call up a map JPG for whichever site it was along with the number. Last I heard they are still using it to this day and it takes them seconds to call up any car without needing to pour though books or call anyone off the job.

And THAT is why VB6 is STILL even after all these years the #3 business language. For simple jobs where web access isn't required it allows for an app to be created quickly with minimum effort and at a price that even the smallest shops can afford. When you figure in the amount of man hours I saved that shop by giving them a simple way to keep track of their inventory I'm sure it payed for itself in a few weeks. It is fast, stable, does its job day after day without needing to pay for updates or maintenance. In short it just works. While I wouldn't even attempt some giant complex app in VB6 for these small jobs it simply can't be beat, at least IMHO.

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[drinkypoo]

They did this same strategy with the PS2 and its emotion engine or whatever. I remember after about a year, hearing about how these first gen games still hadn't even used a good hunk of the PS2's power. Well, if you look at some of the games that came out over the next few years, I'd say they were right!

Then I'd say you have to be an idiot to buy the PS3 until near the end of its lifespan, when the games are good, and the system is cheaper and has hopefully had most of the bugs worked out. Hell, if they continue to follow the PS2 model to the letter (so far, so good - they lied about the specs, lied about the release, brought out a system with a high failure rate... though not as high as Microsoft's, and made it hard to develop games for it) then they'll bring out a smaller, cooler version and everyone with a first-generation PS3 is really going to be kicking their own ass.

It's interesting that Sony won their position at the top of the heap by making it easy to develop games on the original Playstation, and kicked the Sega Saturn's ass handily, mostly because it was much much harder to code for. Then they brought out the most complicated and wonky game console ever, which would have needed only a crappy development system with no documentation to be Sega Saturn MkII, while Sega brought out the relatively elegant and quite capable Dreamcast, only to have it murdered by Sony outright lying about the PS2's specifications and the console's lack of hardware-based DRM (seriously. at least on the Saturn you have to plug in a modchip, on the PS1 it's a pretty serious job and on the PSOne it's a terrible one. If you aren't exceptionally nimble-fingered, anyway.)

If games for the Xbox 360 are already at their best, and games for the PS3 aren't, why on earth would I buy a PS3 now?

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[shutdown -p now]

Yes, I'd say you are correct and I agree with you. Unfortunately, this has also resulted in games being programmed for the Xbox then ported to Windows. This leaves you with clunky interfaces and bugs that are nearly unbelieveable. One good example of this is GTA4. Designed with the Xbox in mind, it's been hell for anyone trying to run it under Windows.

While true, the question, as usual, is - who's to say that, if there were no XBox, there would be GTA4 for PC?

I'd still rather take the bastardized console offspring over the complete lack of the game...

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[i.r.id10t]

Yup, VB is the scripting language of choice for the GUI dependent Windows world... lord knows I did more than a few things with it that could be done with bash, etc. on a *nix system.

Also, in the pre-server side scripting language days (before PHP, etc) it was also relatively easy to do basic CGI stuff with it...

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[alienw]

The PS3 will never be $100. Just like the Xbox was never $100, just like the 360 will never be $100. That's not possible when you need to have a hard drive, a Blu-ray drive, a fairly advanced processor that you don't manufacture, and expensive high-speed RAM. The only console that is cheap enough for this is the Wii -- it could already be sold for $100 if Nintendo wanted to do that.

Besides, the PS3 is seriously lagging behind the 360 as far as games go. For the most part, the 360 has better games, better graphics, and better online play. Of course, some people buy both, simply because the 360 is a good console and the PS3 is a good Blu-ray player.

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[alienw]

Well, that's all nice when you have crappy competition like the N64, which was pretty much a complete bitch to program for. Unfortunately for Sony, Microsoft is extremely well positioned to compete with the PS3. They have excellent dev tools, a lot of experience with game APIs, and an understanding of what it takes to actually write games. Sony is fundamentally a hardware company that has no understanding of software development. The problem is, hardware is now a commodity. That is what bit them in the ass with music players, and it will bite them in the ass with consoles, too.

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[Mad Merlin]

You can't make a hard drive for $25.

Maybe, but you can get a USB key for $10, and that's not even bulk pricing.

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[damaki]

Are you kidding?
There were litteraly dozens of great third party games and not only the best selling ones. Look at Street Fighter 2, SNES had the best Arcade conversions, and what about Square/Enix and others RPGs? Platform/action games, such as, you know, Castlevania IV which is insanely good. Or maybe International Superstar Soccer, for soccer fans. Maybe we could have a look at Civilization, Sim City, Toy Story.

Dude, there are so many amazing third party games that were awesome.

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[Draek]

If programmers spent less time figuring out the hardware, perhaps they could spend more time working on plot, playability, and flow. Or you can be Sony and make excuses after the fact.

Or you could let programmers worry about the programming and hire actual writers for the plot and, if the plot sucks, hire better writers, not call Bob from programming and tell him to start writing.

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[hairyfeet]

I think it is because unlike most "jack of all trades" languages VB6 is really only made for one job: Make a GUI frontend to a database. Pick up any VB6 book, and while they will always have a few goof off jobs(mine had make a Trident based web browser) nearly every lesson is "make a GUI for a database" just different variations thereof.

And let us be honest here, for most small businesses that is all they really need. They have data that they need a way for even a temp worker to find the information and get it out quickly. That's all. They don't need web access, or multi-level permissions or auto synced information that goes halfway around the planet. They just have data they need to access quickly and easily. Be it buying history, order information, or as in my example locations of products. Databases really don't care WHAT you put into them but the average person needs something other than cooking up SQL statements to get the data out. That is where VB6 excels and why it is still popular to this day.

Could you write the same program in Java or C++? Sure you could. Could you do it for $700 including data entry and have it done and deployed in less than 3 weeks? Kinda doubt it. Not and make any profit on it anyway. With VB6 hooking up a GUI to a datatbase is beyond simplistic. So all you really need to do is tailor the GUI to the small business that needs it. A couple of mockups and feedback solves that problem pretty quick. So while I can't comment too much on other languages(I am a PC and network repair guy by trade not a programmer) I can say I have never seen anyone whip off a GUI that hooks to a database as quickly as I have seen it done in VB6.

And programmers really shouldn't look down so on VB6. It is not the languages fault if bad programmers try to fit it into a job it wasn't built for. If you do as I do and ONLY use it to make GUIs for databases I bet you'll find VB6 is perfect for that niche. And it just happens to be a niche that SOHOs and SMBs often need filled. And to me that is the ultimate answer. If it makes the customer happy and fulfills their needs in the time and price allotted, who are we to say they are wrong? They are happy, I have money in my pocket. Seems like a win/win to me.

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[nacturation]

... just because Sony decide to make it deliberately hard in order to artificially prolong the life of a console.

I don't think the point is that Sony made it deliberately hard. Sony made a system with a lot of longevity, but the price for that longevity is complexity. It's the difference between developing something really easy to use where you'll max out its potential in a short time vs. something that's not very easy to use but you can do just about anything. A simple calculator vs. a reverse polish notation programmable calculator, for example.

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[electrosoccertux]

I think this is a flamebait article. Of course Sony doesn't make it hard on purpose. What they have is a choice of hardware platforms on the table. Platform 1 is hard to develop for, however given quality programming, can provide great graphics. Platform 2 is easier to develop for, however does not have the same potential for optimization.

Let say I sell plants. I have two choices of shelves on which I will store my plants for the customer to browse through. On one of them, the bottom shelf has 3 feet of room, the middle shelf has 2 feet of room, and the top third has 1 foot of vertical space to work with (ignore the top of the shelf); for a total of 6 feet. The other shelf has 3 shelves as well, but each has 2 feet of space.

If I go with the first shelf, I can put big plants on the bottom, medium plants in the middle, and small plants on top. However, this using shelf requires extra effort on my part (sorting the plants into small, medium, and large). The second shelf, however, I don't have a chance for optimization-- all the shelves only have 2 feet of vertical room. As a result I cannot stock plants which are taller than 2 feet. Lets say the profit potential on the 3x2 foot shelves is $100. However, if I am willing to make the time investment to maximize plant placement on the customized shelves, I can make $120; the extra $20 coming from buyers who want plants larger than 2 feet high.

PS3 is a similar scenario-- the extra $20 is the potential for better graphics quality. Microsoft chose to go with the 3x2 foot shelves. All their developers can make great looking games. But the potential for game and engine optimization is minimal. Sony, on the other hand, went with the customized shelves. This enables their developers, with greater time investment, to make a game with more visual effects, that the Xbox360 would not be able to run, no matter the level of optimization.

I think Sony's choice would have been the right one if they could have released alongside the Xbox360. But coming late to the game hurt them. When games as great as Killzone2 can be made with a 40 man team, the Xbox360 team takes what, 35 people? If you can make a good game, a game sells 2 million units at $50/game (that's $100million!) an extra 5 developers to optimize the engine for the hardware is not a problem.

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[yo_tuco]

"Let say I sell plants."

I would have preferred a car analogy. It would have not been as complex to develop your point and you'd have done it with fewer words.

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[Rallion]

Though what you describe is quite common, there are an increasing number of counter-examples. By all accounts, Mass Effect is better on the PC than on the XBox, because they actually improved the interface. (I only played the XBox version myself, so I can't speak to that myself.) Mirror's Edge has better physics capabilities on PC. And I just downloaded and played through the new PC demo of The Last Remnant, a game that was panned for its technical problems when released on the console, but it ran beautifully on my computer.

It looks like what's happening in a lot of cases is that developers go to consoles first, because that's where the most money is. But if that console is the 360, they practically already have a PC game made. The 'porting' ends up being a process of not simply making it work, but of making improvements, tailoring it to the platform, and taking advantage of the extra opportunities offered by a keyboard/mouse interface or increased memory or more powerful graphics cards. (And then the PC version is usually $10 cheaper. Hah!)

Obviously, GTAIV does not fit this description, which makes me glad I have the 360 version. However, I did get the PC version of Fallout 3, which was supposedly not even designed with a specific platform in mind; yet, along with what seems like half the people playing it on the PC, I'm having horrendous stability issues with it. Every time I shoot an enemy for the first time, there's about a 1/10 chance the game will crash, and that's just one trigger among many. And of course Bethesda has, again, relied on the mod community to make their interface less huge and obnoxious. Really, guys? You have a third of my screen, and we can only fit three lines of text there at a time, and then not even let me use the scroll wheel to move through them?

So, yeah, crappy ports exist. They're common, even. Mentally, I still file the word 'port' somewhere next to 'crap'. But that might be starting to change a bit.

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[atraintocry]

Offtopic: part of the reason that 8- and 16-bit era games got better towards the end of their systems' lives was because (a) as the price of ROM memory fell, you could squeeze in better graphics, (b) cartridge-based games means you can augment the console by putting a coprocessor right on the game board. The first one was especially pronounced with the NES, the second with the SNES. Sega took the opposite path, releasing new hardware every other week, and to nobody's surprise but theirs, they no longer sell hardware.

Sure, part of it is better engines and better coding practices, but IMO the effect is a lot less dramatic with today's consoles.

On-topic: Sony's always had the power to prevent undesirable studios from making games. All they have to do is refuse to sell them the license. They have always had that control. Doing it through the API is phenomenally stupid and I have to assume that Sony is just lying here. The reality is most likely that the designers didn't do enough to make accessing hardware functions easy or elegant, and Sony wants to spin the studios' complaints into something that points to the system having increased quality.

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[AbRASiON]

The 360 does not blindly have 'the better games' in any way at all.
This is firstly a completely and utterly subjective thing.

Secondly, something which 360 gamers seem to blindly forget (time and time again) is that NOT EVERYONE OWNS A 360!
So right now there are PS2 / Xbox1 / GC owners who are looking for a new console, don't blindly assume they have a 360 and the PS3 offers no value.

About half of the 360's good games are ALREADY ON the PS3, as they are cross platform.
About half of the remaining half are coming out on the PC also....... or already out
The remaining 25% of the 360's good games are truely exclusive to the 360.

That being said, of course half of the PS3's great games are cross platform and also on 360, logically of course.

I am tired of having to defend my purchase of the PS3 to people blindly assuming 'everyone has a 360, why get a PS3?'
I am getting a perfectly satisfactory experience on PSN for free, some may argue the 360's cost of live is cheap but as a 'hard-casual' gamer (less than 30 hours online a year but I do play mainstream blockbusters all the time) - why the heck should I pay 50$ a year for online?

Also the PS3 is SIGNIFICANTLY quieter than the 360 is, before the option to load to HDD (NXE) the 360 was frankly, a god damned abomination of noise in my loungeroom, I was glad to sell it.

Overall I'm very very happy with my purchase and if anything, Microsoft need to woo me in to re-buy another 360.
Gears bored me senseless, why I don't know but it did, it's a shame as I'd heard so much positive about it.
I loathe Halo as one of the most over-rated franchises of all times.
Fable 2 they completely stuffed the movement, animation and camera code compared to the original >:( I found this not fun either (damnit!)
Finally Forza 3,... well this is something I want pretty bad.

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[Rimbo]

Actually, ever try programming in C on, say, an Apple //e?

You can try it right now. Go get Virtual II or some other emulator, grab a copy of Aztec C compiler, and try it yourself.

The reason BASIC was so popular back in the days of 8-bit PCs was because it was simpler than Assembly language, and the interpreter could easily fit in a very tiny amount of ROM; the programs themselves were efficiently-stored as well.

On the flip side, C requires a compiler, a linker, a decent library to take advantage of the system. Aztec C even came with a full-fledged C shell, two separate compilers -- the second compiler provided an interpreted bytecode-style object, just like BASIC, to keep the binary size from exceeding the 64KB page limit.

The problem with C at that time was that it was a 16-bit language in an 8-bit world.

So BASIC became something that shipped with nearly every PC in existence, and lots of people learned it. It stuck around because BASIC was, in a sense, something Microsoft was really attached to, but also you had these massive armies of people who'd only really learned BASIC as a language. When Microsoft became dominant, VB became important along with it.

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[Nebu]

I am tired of having to defend my purchase of the PS3 to people blindly assuming 'everyone has a 360, why get a PS3?'

Uh... why do you feel you need to defend your purchase of the PS3? I'm pretty confident nobody on the Internet really cares what you, personally, have bought and why.

If you're happy with your PS3, that's great. But any anguish from "having to defend" is just coming from within yourself. There will always be flame wars around consoles on the Internet. Learn to just relax and enjoy the consoles you own. Who cares what other people on the Internet think is the better console? If you're happy with your console, that's all that matters, right?

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[pegasustonans]

Besides, the PS3 is seriously lagging behind the 360 as far as games go. For the most part, the 360 has better games, better graphics, and better online play.

I'm tired of people dragging out this three-year-old argument. It's simply not true.

If Killzone 2 isn't enough to convince you that the consoles are an even playing-field, then how about these PS3 exclusives:

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
LittleBigPlanet
Resistance: Fall of Man
Resistance 2
Warhawk
Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction
Heavenly Sword
Folklore
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune
Gran Turismo 5: Prologue
MotorStorm
MotorStorm: Pacific Rift
Valkyria Chronicles
Wipeout HD
Flower

Perpetuating the fallacy that the 360 has better graphics is so 2006. I own both consoles and can honestly say that there are no differences worth mentioning in any worthwhile games over the past year.

Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want

[default luser]

But you just can't do that anymore, and still expect developers to hang-on tight. Let's look at the progression.

PlayStation: one of the easiest consoles to develop for at the time of release. Featured a single beefy processor, and a simple ploygon-based 3D rendering pipeline (minus a few features). Long-term improvement: people decried the CD media for it's slow load times, but then developers learned to stream data off the CD, making later games more fluid and much more immense.

PlayStation 2: more difficult to develop for because the dual vector units VU0 and VU1 were the source of most of the system's computational power. Developers, however, could start-out just using the main CPU for game engine, and the vector units for serial graphics processing only, and still unlock about %60-70 of the system's potential power. Stepping-up to use of the dual vector units provided a decent late-game improvement.

PlayStation 3: much more difficult to program for than any previous console. Just for reference, if you took a program parallized to work well on the PS2, and just ported it wholesale to the PS3, you would only unlock about %20 of the performance potential of the PS3. Pathetic. The difficulty of fully-harnessing the PS3 is already made clear in the article above, and some developers may never be able to, as you may not be able to split your game's threadas eight-ways.

There's "building potential" into the system, and then there's the PS3. The costs of unlocking the PS3's potential are too high for most developers, especially if they're making a multi-platform release (where you can't re-use most of the optimizations made for the PS3). You can only charge so much on a game before customers won't pay the toll.

Straight from the OSS fanboi playbook

[Anonymous Coward]

"We don't want stupid people using our stuff"

Re:Straight from the OSS fanboi playbook

[aliquis]

lol, it's funny because it's true.

Anyway, this CEOs claim is obviously bullshit or a translation made by the interviewer/whatever. No-one would make it hard to develop for their system on purpose, but it's a fact that people get the hang of it and as a result of that you may see more advanced titles further into the systems life.

He may have meant that they didn't wanted to cripple it for the sake of making it easier to code for since it would be around for a long time and people would get the hang of it sooner or later anyway.

Re:Straight from the OSS fanboi playbook

[HAKdragon]

In regards to the mis-translation idea, Kaz Hirai speaks perfect English (Ridge Racer!). In fact, I've only ever seen him speak English, never Japanese.

Brilliant!

[DoofusOfDeath]

1. Develop console containing pretty cool hardware.

2. Make it hard to develop, while Microsoft and Nintendo have the opposite goal.

3. In the early years of the console, have many fewer good games than XBox360 does. So constantly be at risk of not reaching critical mass.

4. ???

5. Profit!

Sounds like Sony turned this into a SDK philosophy.

Let darwin decide?

[girlintraining]

I go to an obscure reference; Acts of Gord, specifically the Book of Chronicles, Chapter 1, wherein the great Gord spake thusly:

The public does NOT buy a system unless they feel it will give them lots of new games down the road. Look at MS. They are screaming "Xbox has
developers! Honest! More than we can fit into a bus!" which is the right approach. Joe Average will NOT buy a system if he feels that there won't be lots of new stuff coming out. And Nintendo burned a lot of bridges with their barren N64 release schedule for good games. They need to come out and say "hey! Hundreds of games are coming out!" except that would be a lie.

I highly encourage you all to go read Acts of Gord, not only because it's hilarious but because it's written by a guy who actually RAN a video game store. For several years. The bottom line is this: You screw the developers and no games get put out. No games = no consumer interest.

Re:Let darwin decide?

[Attaturk]

...because it's written by a guy who actually RAN a video game store. For several years.

Wow. That's a mighty impressive qualification. ;)

Re:Let darwin decide?

[Jerf]

It puts you on the front line of seeing what decisions people are making and why. It's actually a very important perspective.

I am a developer for a company that sells products and provides in-house phone support. If you asked someone about my product and they piped up and then said at the end "I support this product", you might be tempted to say "Oh, you aren't a developer so you don't know what you're talking about." But the support dude has a better picture of some things than I do, because he's actually there, talking to customers directly, and part of my job is making sure I get that information from him. Because there's just no replacement for that sort of thing; the CEO is even further from customers than I am, my manager tries to keep on top of such things but still doesn't talk directly to customers as much as our support crew.

Of course, I have a better picture than the support dude does of some other things, too, but I'd be a moron if I discounted the support perspective because they're "below" me, or for some other dumb reason.

Running a game store may not qualify you to discuss video game company strategy, and actually Gord tries to sometimes IIRC and at that point I believe he oversteps a bit. But it's the best qualification there is for having a firm grasp on what people are looking for and how people buy, and you ignore that at your own peril... well, "your own peril" if you're a video game company, anyhow, you're probably not in any peril.

You can get this by being an employee too, but A: he did it for a very long time and B: being the business owner and being very, very directly affected by the issues will have a stronger focus on the issues than "somebody who works at Gamestop over Christmas" would.

Re:Let darwin decide?

[Blakey Rat]

I was playing Shadowrun the other day, and I said "mana" when referring to... well, "mana." Someone on my team said that Shadowrun doesn't use the term "mana" it uses "MP" (or something similar.) We got into this whole argument:
* You knew what I meant so why correct me?
* Every game uses "MP" or "Magic" and not the word "Mana" so you should have known that was the wrong term
* Uh, the most popular game on Earth, World of Warcraft, uses the term "Mana" so I think people are going to know what the hell I mean

Then he hit me with the ultimate:

* You should listen to me, man, I work at Gamestop!

This made about half the people on the team just crack up. I had to explain, as gently as possible, that I've never seen a Gamestop employee who had two brain cells to rub together. The thought that he figured "worked at Gamestop" was impressive in some way was simply hilarious.

Anyway, when the competition hits you with "I work at Gamestop!" I generally consider myself winner of the debate.

(BTW, If you care, the "correct" term in Shadowrun is "essence." But say "mana" in case you get that guy on your team, you can piss him off.)

Re:Let darwin decide?

[alienw]

Well, he didn't really succeed at it. I think he folded up shop after a couple of years.

Also, I don't understand your attitude. For the most part, owning your own business is harder, less rewarding, and less productive than working for an established company. Unless you are an exceptional businessman, starting a company is difficult, risky, and a ton of work. If you have some new technology you are commercializing, at least there is a chance that someone will buy the company down the road. Otherwise, you are pretty much stuck fighting for a scrap of market share in what is probably an oversaturated market.

As far as freedom goes, you are much better off working for somebody. If you run a company, you will pretty much be putting in 16-hour days 7 days a week with no vacation time, ever. Sure, you could go on vacation, if you don't mind the company collapsing in the meantime.

Anyway, I would suggest you actually talk to some business owners before you decide that it's something you like. Chances are, you won't like it.

Number of reasons to make a console difficult

[L-Train8]

There are a number of reasons to make a console hard to program for, but they all rely on a huge install base that the PS3 doesn't have. The article quotes a developer saying that if you are going to develop for multiple platforms, it is best to start with the PS3, because it will be easy to port to other systems than to port to the PS3. If there were 20 million PS3's in homes, this would ensure that the 360 and the Wii would be seeing lots of ports instead of original games. Another reason is that investment in programming knowledge and tools is very expensive, and once a studio has the expertise, they are likely to stick with the platform in order to maximize their investment. Sony was counting on a success similar to the PS2, were developers would have to program for the PS3 because that's where the users would be. Without it, the 'benefits' of a hard-to-program console become liabilities.

Re:Number of reasons to make a console difficult

[Anonymous Coward]

Your comment makes perfect sense except...there are 21 million PS3's in homes already. (See http://www.psxextreme.com/ps3-news/4653.html)

Re:Number of reasons to make a console difficult

[commodore64_love]

Sony would have had a success if they had not priced PS3 at DOUBLE the price a console is supposed to be (around $300 historically).

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. Sony priced themselves beyond the budget of most gamers, and those gamers quit #1 Sony (120 million PS2s and 100 million PS1s), and decided to try the reasonably-priced also-rans - Nintendo and Microsoft. Now the also-rans are the new dominators. Sony was foolish.

Re:Number of reasons to make a console difficult

[V!NCENT]

Nobody has yet brought out a game that takes full power of the PS3. That's just like Metal Gear Solid 3 that brought HDR lightning, shaders, cool post-processing effects, briliant animation and a shitload of polygons to the PS2; it takes time.

What happens with the Xbox360? Developpers are taking the fullest out of the Xbox360 and therefore it will not, ever, bring you better graphics, so the lifetime of that console is about to run out.

Graphics on the PS3 will just keep on improving as the console gets cheaper and cheaper and in the end makes more revenue for Sony that the Xbox360 for Microsoft. Believe me when I say that the Xbox360 support will just drop like a stone when the next Xbox comes out, just like the Xbox1 when the 360 came out, while the PS3 will just like the PS2 be supported for many years.

How expensive was the PS2 when it was released? Yup... See what a succes that became?

Re:Number of reasons to make a console difficult

[Darkness404]

It is becoming increasingly obvious that most people just care about if a game is fun or not. For example, I don't care if I can count the hairs in Solid Snake's beard or not, so long as the game is fun. Sure, I'd rather the graphics not look like crap, but all the 3 major consoles (Wii, PS3 and 360) have decent enough graphics.

This is why the Wii is dominating, it is focusing more on what makes games fun rather then proclaiming that they can put 34234234234234 scaling and rotating polygons on the screen all rendering withing .005 MS.

Graphics != A good game. Sure, I'd rather have a game with good graphics then not, but really, if the same game was on the Wii, PS3, and 360 I'd pick the one that had the most content and best controls rather then the best graphics.

Re:Number of reasons to make a console difficult

[Quarters]

Right...so you actually think the 360 will die out because games may at some point look better on the PS3. Outside of platform exclusives, which are a dying breed of game anyway, no developer will ever utilize that extra oomph that they may be able to eek out of the PS3. There will never be enough ROI on PS3 only game sales to justify having one set of art assets for the 360 version of the game and a different set of art assets for the PS3 version.

People don't care that game X has 20% more polygons than game Y. What they care about is owning a fun game that looks good. Developers care about being able to develop a game quickly, easily and on/under budget. The 360 provides all of that currently and will continue to do so. The PS3 is a PITA to work with now (yes, I am a dev), and it will continue to be a PITA to work with in the future. Whatever untapped potential the PS3 may have that is yet to be unlocked is not worth the time/expense it will take to find it. Especially not in this economy and especially not since the ratio of potential sales 360:PS3 is heavily weighted against the PS3 currently.

In Defence of Sony...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think what the CEO making the comment did a poor job of communicating. Also, the article title is a bit misleading.

I believe Sony aims to make a new architecture, which RESULTS it being hard to program for. But the beauty of a new architecture is that it can be very powerful if done right. And why not? You're aiming to get 10 years out of it (in PS3's case) and the hardware ain't gonna change.

Now to put things in perspective, I remember a comment being made about how in the PS1 era developers wanted more access to the hardware. Then came the PS2, which in the end was a little bit more to the metal then developers hoped for.
They then commented they wanted something easier.

So based on what I know about the PS3 (new architecture, but with lots of middleware), I think Sony has achieved this.

Is it still hard? Yes. Will developers get a grip on it and realize it's full potential? Quite possible.

Re:In Defence of Sony...

[Anonymous Coward]

I work as a software developer for a prominent games development company. We make games for multiple platforms (Xbox 360,PS3,Wii,PC, PS2, Xbox, and of course in the past other consoles).

What we do is make a single common engine that runs on all platforms, this is so the people developing the actual game have a common and easy base to work from. (In theory)

Have you noticed multi platform games look better on the Xbox 360 vs the PS3 or PS3 ones come out way later? The simple reason is you have to sweat blood and tears to get the same performance out of the PS3 to match the Xbox. (Hear those thousands of screams out in the night? Those are PS3 developer! :)

Of course on paper the PS3 is more "powerful" (well besides the GPU which isn't), but spending an additional 12+ developer months to get the engine working at the same speed and quality which the competitors platform have from day one is bad for Sony.

I think we'd all agree spending that developer time on the actual game would be more beneficial!

Additionally Microsoft's developer tools are much more mature and user friendly.
Thanks

Re:In Defence of Sony...

[MikeBabcock]

Other "actual developers" have not had this problem by designing their engine for the PS3 and then porting it to the 360 instead. Have a chat with the guys at Criterion about Burnout: Paradise, why don't you?

Targeting the PS3 as your primary platform helps make your code work smarter from day one, and actually makes it more efficient on the 360 as well.

Re:In Defence of Sony...

[Anonymous Coward]

That would have been nice, except we had 360 devkits a YEAR before we had ps3 documentation. It's hard to make a game when everyone has a 360 on their desk and there are THREE ps3 devkits in the company for the first year. Oh, the 360 had an excellent development environment from day one and the ps3 is STILL weak. Also the early ps3 devkits sounded like jet engines so everyone hated to have them turned on. Way to make us want to use them!
Just for the record, asymmetric multiprocessing sucks. Especially when almost NONE of your datasets fit into the SPU memory (256K), let alone the code to process it. There are few game related tasks (besides graphics) that take well to a streamed architecture.
The people who designed the cell architecture knew NOTHING about programming games (read the book 'The race for a new game machine') and it really shows. They went by what Sony told them and Sony really does suck at software. All of the good graphics APIs and tools were actually done by first party developers and then released to everyone else. Sony does develop them further but they had nothing to do with the design.
On a final note, when you have to burn 20%-50% of the SPU processing to lighten the GPU load so the PS3 can just barley KEEP UP with te 360's GPU you know it's crap.
Bah. I program the ps3 for a living and I really love the challenge but damn they chose poorly this time around.

Never attribute to malice...

[orkybash]

I don't know if Sony intentionally obfuscated their API as the summary claims, but rather just didn't care about ease of development. Sounds to me like they're saying that developing for a cell architecture is necessarily hard, and they didn't want to compromise on the architecture because (as Sony has previously stated) the PS3 is supposed to last ten years instead of the typical 4-5. I guess the cell is supposed to be more longevous?

Of course, the end result, that developers are preferring the Xbox and Wii, is the same whether malice or just misguided...

Pure Spin

[tkrotchko]

This is a case of pure spin combined with a lack of english skills. Here's what he was trying to say:

"Our hardware is so powerful that *of course* it's hard to develop for. So to use the most advanced hardware in the world, only the smartest developers will take advantage of it".

That kind of spin may play in Japanese markets, but it just sounds dumb to everyone else.

Re:Pure Spin

[syousef]

I don't know. The number of times people have insisted that Visual Basic was bad because it was easy and therefore anyone could do it (meaning that incompetents jump in and do a poor job) on this board alone astounds me.

The reality is VB was bad because you could make a real mess of things even if you were a good programmer, and people abused it trying to force it to do things that really required something closer to the machine. It didn't help that it was proprietary and windows only either. The one thing that it and other Rapid Application Development languages like RAD did was get out of the programmers way and make it really easy to do things so that the coder could focus on the problem at hand not puzzle through dozens of APIs and scratch his (or her) head wondering how to get something simple done.

With a simple and easy API a moron will sure make a mess of things, but a GOOD coder will be able to stop focusing on the code grind and rise above to make programming magic.

I develop with J2EE and I absolutely miss and pine for the days when I could prototype a screen in under half an hour. What an over-engineered piece of turd with an extra dollop of XML hell and a heaped serve of Design Pattern madness all those frameworks are.

Uhhhhh

[Sycraft-fu]

I'm going to hope that he just misspoke and what he was really trying to say is "Because our hardware is so advanced, it can't be made easy to develop for." I would hope he's really not so dumb as to think that deliberately making it hard to program for is a good thing.

However I fear his actual words have some truth to them. Not that Sony tried to make it hard on purpose, but that it is in fact hard, and won't be getting easier for two reasons: Sony doesn't really have an interest in making it easier. I think there's two reasons for this:

1) The Cell processor is, well, odd. What I mean by that is that it doesn't work like processors in the past. So tools that exist now aren't going to be good at dealing with it, nor is the knowledge that programmers have. It is different and that makes it hard.

2) Sony doesn't have good dev tools, and isn't good at making them. Because of the difference in the processor, making it easy would require some rocking dev tools form Sony. However they don't have those, and don't seem to have the people needed to make them.

So the combination of those gives you a situation where game programmers are being asked to figure shit out, and it seems that Sony thinks that's ok. They figure you ought to.

Well that's a program, especially when MS is your competition. Say what you like about them, but they've got really slick dev tools. Visual Studio is a really slick development environment, and that's what you get to use for Xbox 360 development. What's more, it is something that many programmers are quite familiar with, since it is often what's used to write PC games. Add to that the fact that the 360's hardware is far more like a PC than the PS3 and you've got a platform that is much easier to develop for.

Personally I can't figure out why the hell Sony put the Cell in the PS3. Seems like a really retarded move. When the PS3 came out, the Cell was a brand new architecture. Hell the first thing I ever saw on the market with a Cell was a PS3 (you can now get other things like processing cards for PCs). Ok well a mass market consumer electronics device is NOT where I'd choose to test a new architecture. Start that shit out in research computer (like the aforementioned cards) and then maybe servers and super computers and such. Give it some years on the market for people to get used to it, and for the kinks to be worked out, then look at tossing it in mass market devices.

So who knows, maybe they are right and maybe there is tons of untapped potential. However it also might not matter. If your console is hard to program for, developers may just elect to give it a miss, and thus so may consumers. That does seem to be what is happening. Nintendo and MS are outselling Sony by a good margin. Just because the PS3 might be more powerful (and who knows if that's true or not) doesn't matter if the end result is that it is hard to make games for.

Heck, ask Sega about that. That was one of the things that really hosed the Saturn. It was actually a fairly powerful console. However it was rather hard to develop for. It didn't work like most other consoles and PCs (for example it used quadrilaterals instead of triangles as fundamental surfaces) and it had poor dev tools. As a result many games didn't look as good on it as on other consoles, even though they could have in theory, and other developers simply gave it a miss.

The PS3 seems to be in a somewhat similar situation, and the remarks from Sony do not bode well for that changing.

Forth

[Windrip]

From the DDJ article, this looks like an interesting machine for which to develop a Forth engine. How do I get one of these?

Re:Forth

[Kamineko]

It's logical. The PS2 was the third place, so the PS3 gets Forth.

Just when you think they can't make things worse.

[olddotter]

Wow. Just when you thing they can't shoot themselves in the foot again. (Hasn't Sony run out of feet?)

Apple gets it, see the App Store for the iPhone. Microsoft gets it, they really focus on wooing developers.

Hopefully this was an idea lost in translation. If he said "Its not easy to develop for because if we focus on that, then it wouldn't be the console with the most FLOPS."; then I could deal with.

Sony losses money on the console. They need titles to make money on the over all project. To get titles they need developers. They need a VERY low cost PS3 developer boot camp to teach the tricks of the console and to encourage developers to write more games.

Other coverage

[lseltzer]

Yeah, I saw a video about this recently: Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn't Fucking Work

cell programming

[goombah99]

Multi-core and multi-cpu programming is the future. I include GPUs in this. And programming these using existing tools is sub optimal.

But it's a catch 22. Few people are going to get their fingers wet in GPU programming without bridge tools like CUDA and fortran wrappers that make it less painful to change over hardcore math libraries. Yet at the same time the resulting code is sub optimal. for example the zeroth order in tools in CUDA sweep the matrix multiply back from the GPU to the CPU memory-- which is not what you want if you are dooing two consecutive matrix multiples. But it gets you started. (I note that more advanced, less library bound, cuda programming get's around this, but only a fool would invest the time learn it before trying the simple way).

Cell programming is another knotch up in difficulty. So sub-optimal convestion approaches may not work well. You really need to program for the CELL. No one really is perfectly sure what the best way to exploit these things is.

I suspect SONY wants people to commit to figuring the CELL out rather than giving them tools to simply do ports. This is what he meant I think by "increasing quality".

I also suspect this means that games produced form the CELL wont back port easily since it will be so architecture specific. Which is also good for sony.

In the meantime if they sell half as many units as xbox 360, yet 100% of the game profits rather than say 10% of the came profits go to sony and committed exclusive cell programmers, SONY is coming out ahead.

Re:cell programming

[powerlord]

I also suspect that because the Cell is a new architecture with much longer "legs" they can design the PS4 as an incremental improvement over the PS3. Essentially a PS3 with a faster Cell and perhaps a full compliment of cores, more memory, throw in a possibly better graphics chip.

If they follow this strategy (which is very likely) then:

1) The PS4 would probably need a shorter development cycle since it would be an "evolutionary" hardware increase similar to spec-ing out a new PC, not a "revolutionary" increase like going from the PS2 to the PS3.

2) The PS4 would probably be able to have direct backward compatibility "built in" similar to the PS2 supporting PS1 hardware.

3) Any expertise a company gained with PS3 programming would be directly applicable to the PS4.

Nintendo's Wii2 should be fine from a hardware standpoint (bump the specs a bit more, maybe include low end HD graphics, but keep things "lite").
MS on the other hand have saddled themselves with a multi-core PowerPC architecture, that even Apple was moving aware from in their competition with MS. Which it may have worked for this generation of console, I wonder how expandable the design would be for the NEXT generation.

Re:cell programming

[seebs]

I don't think they'll bother.

Cell was designed when multicore was large and expensive, and GPUs weren't very good.

Now, Cell's going to always have higher development costs than conventional multicore chips, and not much payoff for developers.

Look at the difference between consumer-oriented video games and supercomputing. Supercomputing clusters can cost enough money that their power bill alone vastly exceeds the cost of all the software development ever done for them. Spending a bunch extra on development can pay off hugely if it reduces runtime -- so a hard-to-target architecture pays off.

Now look at video games. Development costs are huge and out of control, and you don't get paid by the polygon anyway, so extra work on performance doesn't necessarily pay off. A console which pushes fewer polygons but is cheaper to develop for makes you more money.

Re:cell programming

[Weedlekin]

"MS on the other hand have saddled themselves with a multi-core PowerPC architecture, that even Apple was moving aware from in their competition with MS."

Apple moved away because IBM repeatedly failed to produce a low-power G5 suitable for laptop / notebook PCs. Being stuck with the ageing and increasingly anaemic-looking G4 line for portables was making Apple's offerings look worse in comparison with the competition every year, so Jobs eventually got fed up with being made to look like an idiot by repeatedly promising things that IBM said would be Available Real Soon(TM), and then failed to deliver.

NB: the Cell microprocessor is a member of the IBM POWER line, so Sony are just as saddled with the PowerPC architecture as MS (and indeed Nintendo).

Re:cell programming

[powerlord]

You are absolutely correct that MS, Sony and Nintendo are all using the PowerPC architecture in their consoles (hence the reason people say IBM was the one who really "won" this generation), but MS is using the PowerPC chip as each of its cores in its multi-core design. Increasing its power while keeping the same architecture would mean increasing the number of PowerPC cores, or increasing the core's efficiency (either through design or clock speed). I thought one of the reasons that Apple left

Nintendo is irrelevant to this discussion since I believe they could easily bump the current Wii's specs considering how "underpowered" most consider their design compared to the PS3 and 360.

Sony is using the PowerPC chip as the main core to handle scheduling of the Cell's SPUs (the PPE), but most of the heavy lifting for the PS3 is accomplished in threads for the SPUs. Upping the speed and number of the SPUs should translate into a bump in speed (or increasing the number of Cell chips used), all of which could be done without directly affecting the need to significantly change the PPE.

As it is existing PS3s only use six of the eight SPUs on a Cell due to initial poor yeilds with one SPU reserved for the OS, increased yields would probably put an extra SPU available to developers. IBM has also announced that it is going to be moving the Cell to a 45nm Fab and has announced quite a few roadmap improvements to the existing architecture without requiring a huge amount of design for a whole new platform.

Re:cell programming

[Rayonic]

Games like Drake's Fortune, Ratchet & Clank, Killzone 2 and the Motorstorm games simply aren't being made for other platforms. These games are unparalleled on other systems, and just being ignored by fanboys who think console sales are everything.

Er, those games aren't any more technically advanced than what's shown up on the Xbox 360. Sure they're nice and polished, but there's no one game that you can point to and say "that would be impossible to do on the Xbox 360!"

Compare this to the original Xbox (or Gamecube), which did have a distinct graphical advantage over the PS2, and it showed up in the games from day one.

If the PS3 hasn't pulled ahead graphically by now, then it's just not going to. There's no super hidden power inside. Just a weird CPU and a run-of-the-mill GPU.

Some facts.

[FatherOfONe]

1. The Xbox 360 was release a year before the PS3 and with that year head start it gained around 7 million users. If you trust Microsoft they sold 10 million the first year! So given that it was around 7 million units sold. The 360 and the PS3 have been selling around the same amount from launch.
2. The Wii is also hard to develop for yet it is selling at around a 2 to 3 times clip of the 360 and PS3.
3. The guy's point was that they could make a system that is easier to develop for at the cost of longevity. In short he is saying to get a 10 year lifespan Sony had to go with something like the Cell and it's 8 SPE's. It is harder to develop for than one core but the payoff over time is worth it. Developers (myself included) are being pushed now to a different style of development and the days of more GHZ every year or so are over. The days of more cores/SPE's are here to stay.

Now my opinion. Sony included a HD, BluRay and Blue Tooth in every console. This was expensive, and a high risk; specifically including BluRay. Will it pay off? Who knows, and given the depression that the U.S. is probably going to hit (given the latest budget bill), disposable income will be very tight. However, BluRay is now the defacto standard for HD movies because of the PS3. What media will the next Xbox use? What about the next Nintendo? Will it be download only? Try telling gamestop, Wallmart, and the other retailers that they won't be selling games at their stores any more... Let the nuclear war begin. Did anyone see what happened when Sony released Warhawk online and in the store?

Sony decided to go with Nvidia and include 256MB of video memory and 256MB of System RAM. In my belief this was the mistake. Then again I realize that they couldn't make a $1,000 console. If it was me I probably would have scrapped BluRay and added more RAM. I would have then kept the cost around the same, released the same time as the 360. I would have also made a version of Linux the default OS for the system.

Now all three consoles have some great games (my opinion again). Nintendo owns the kids and casuals, but their 3rd party support can't seem to crack large sales numbers. The 360 has a good user base even with the greater than 30% hardware failure rate of the system. The $200 price tag is helping the system a ton. Yet that is the problem for the future in that the $200 system is lacking a HD and thus developers can't rely on it. Sony also has a nice install base but has one HUGE problem. Price. At $400-$500 it is priced out of the market of normal people. "If" Sony gets the price down to $300 soon then they should be fine. By fine I mean they will compete nicely with the other consoles this year.

Lastly, It is apparent to me that Microsoft is a software company (30% failure rate!), Sony is a hardware company (development kits are not that good), but the hardware is the best, and Nintendo is a game company.

Remember, folks...

[macraig]

... this is precisely the same (Sony) mindset that gave breech birth to Sony's rootkit DRM and Sony's pointlessly proprietary Memory Stick format, etc, etc, etc.

This is a company so irretrievably mired in proprietary thinking that it will be a miracle if it survives the coming revolution. Sony will likely wither and die rather than adapt to the emerging open source "standard". To steal a word from the Obama Revolution:

Open Source == transparency

I don't think the forces of greed can stop the revolution this time. Either ya get on board this love train or get left behind! Are ya listening, Sony?

Re:Python?

[Anonymous Coward]

python is vb for people that hate vb.

FTFY.

Seriously... have you even used Python and VB? They are both imperative languages--and that's about where the similarity ends.

this policy could have made sense

[Sir_Sri]

Basic ides: If the PS3 is sufficently unique it won't be worth the effort to port it to other consoles. A future looking architecture is a many core system, and we can continue, with the PS4 to use a better version of said new architecture.

Bad assumption: All of the PS2 devs who were exclusive would stay that way.

Bad business: Not paying for exclusives. If sony had opened up the wallet and left the 360 with Halo as it's only real platform exclusive the PS3 would be doing much better. Losing FF13 and GTA (as exclusives) was a really bad move on their part, there are other titles too.

Bad technology: The PS3 is marginally more powerful than the 360, but in the wrong area. nVIDIA is mostly right on this, any half decent CPU is fast enough for whatever you want to do. The Cell is an expensive CPU design, which even fully utilized doesn't add a whole lot to the gameplay experience. The conole also launched a year after the 360, it should have been significantly more powerful. Sony would have made their lives much easier if they had put 2GiB of memory in the system and a variant on the 8800 rather than 7800, then a game written for the PS3 would in some respects be clearly better than its 360 counterpart. Developers would be able to easily exploit some of that power (notably RAM), and customers would see a real tangible benefit.

Other bad technical: The hard drive used is a notebook drive. This adds no functionality, but increases cost. One can argue blu-ray until you're blu in the face, it at least adds functionality, and IMO is a big contributor to why blu ray won the format war. But the hard drive...just wtf? Stripping BC from later consoles was really bad too. I just got Killzone2, in anticipation I went and played through Killzone 1 again, to get a feel for the world again. Try doing that on a new PS3

Where to go in future: Sony needs to launch a PS4 the moment dx11 is finalized, and hope MS isn't doing the same. A PS4 with 28 cell processor, 4 GiB of ram and a directx11 compatible video card. It would be fully BC with the current PS3, relatively easy to develop for when going from the PS3 development, and be so clearly better than the Xbox360. MS has a problem, their architecture died and became the Cell. They could go back to intel/AMD (like the xbox) but that pretty much tosses BC. They have the clear advantage in dev tools and being behind a lot of DX11. But then is the Xbox3 going to be "Now with the cell and blu ray"? That's not going to make for good marketting. If they go the "Now with an intel CPU" route they're back to competing with themselves on the PC. MS also has a harder time justifying a new console, they're sort of winning, but not making much money. Making another huge investment in console R&D in that position would be unpopular. Sony is losing, they want to stop losing, that justifies more money.

debugging

[igomaniac]

There is no doubt that multi-core, multi-cpu programming is the future, but at the moment the tools are bascially crap. At least with CUDA there's a programming paradigm that's actually usable, but there is still no way to debug your program. Well, you can run in emulation mode, but your code will run so slow it never gets to the point where the bug occurs -- and anyway if you have a non-trivial bug it won't behave the same. And CUDA has the _best_ of these next generation toolchains. Until you have real debugging and profiling capabilities, even the best programmers won't be able to reach the level of productivity they can on more mature platforms...

Reverse Conspiracy Theory

[fm6]

This reminds me a lot of some nonsense Charles Petzold wrote in an early edition of "Programming Windows". As you'd expect, he starts with a "hello world" example. One expects such a basic program to be maybe a half-dozen lines, with only a line or two of logic, and the rest syntactic sugar. But Petzold's example covers almost two pages and is extremely dense and complicated code. And while this example is a little less elegant than it could be, there's not actually a lot you can do to make it shorter. He explains this by claiming that the Windows API is extremely powerful, and you can't have power without complexity.

Obvious nonsense. Powerful development environments hide the complexity behind simple idioms. The real problem is that the developers who created the Windows APIs simply didn't bother to think through the use cases that programmers would have to deal with. (To be fair, early Mac and X Window APIs were even worse.) Petzold, out of loyalty to the environment he's documenting, rationalizes this problem away.

Hirai is sort of making the same argument, but only as an afterthought. His main argument is a sort of reverse conspiracy theory, that making the platform hard to program for will has some weird positive benefit. Not clear what he thinks that benefit is — he probably doesn't know himself! In any case, he's just doing a lame "we meant to do that" rationalization.

Re:Reverse Conspiracy Theory

[fm6]

To me "early" means 3.0, the first version of Windows that had a serious feature set, and that was widely adopted. But I believe that the code example I was talking about goes back to 2.0 at least.

I did once glance at the 1.0 version of Petzold's book. Didn't check out the "hello world" example, but it's interesting to note that in this version, Windows is described as a "Presentation Manager" for PC-DOS! This fits in with the original joint Microsoft-IBM plan to abandon DOS once a real OS had been created. (In OS/2, the "Presentation Manager" is the GUI subsystem.) So perhaps the 1.0 feature set reflects the assumption that Windows was just lipstick on a pig, not the complete new animal.

Really stupid headline

[tgibbs]

This seems to be a particularly idiotic attempt to "spin" what was actually said. There is nothing at all in the statement about Sony intentionally introducing programming obstacles.

It is quite obvious that Hirai was explaining why Sony chose a powerful, if more difficult to program for, multiprocessor architecture over a simpler, less powerful architecture. Sony wanted a platform that would have enough power to sustain itself for 10 years. So they did not consider it to be a major detriment that developers would not immediately be able to unlock to full power of the architecture, because much of that power was intended to allow the console "room to grow."

Simply not true.

[bhpaddock]

You seem to be missing the point. It's not just hard to "take full advantage" of the PS3, it's hard to make the damn thing work at all.

You mentioned HDR, something that Xbox developers take for granted since they have 3 different ways of doing it, all which are easy and which given them different performance / quality trade-offs.

Not only is it *harder* to do HDR on the PS3, but the PS3 simply doesn't have the memory bandwidth to accommodate HDR without sacrificing in several other areas (resolution, FSAA, texture size and filtering, etc). Whereas the 360 allows you to balance out the resolution, level of HDR, level of FSAA, texture size, etc - the PS3 lets you pick one. Because if you want 1080p there's no way in hell you're getting any HDR, FSAA, or anything else that requires memory bandwidth.

That's why games look and run better on the 360. Even in the rare cases where one aspect (like, say, HDR) looks a little better on the PS3, it always sacrifices in other areas, resulting in a better experience on the 360. Even if you could eek out some minuscule visual advantage from the PS3 (good luck), no one is going to care. That's not why people buy games.