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Hideo Kojima To Depart Konami; Metal Gear Franchise Changing Hands
An anonymous reader writes: Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima is set to leave the video game publisher Konami, ending 29 years of service. Konami had announced a restructuring earlier this year, and observant fans recently noticed the removal of references to Kojima Productions from the company's web site. A source speaking to Gamespot states that both developments are the result of a "power struggle" between the studio and its parent. Konami has now confirmed to the English-speaking press that Kojima will work on The Phantom Pain until it is completed, but they are searching for new staff to take over the Metal Gear series. Kojima's only other announced project was Silent Hills, a horror game created in collaboration with Guillermo del Toro.
Having shipped a few PS2 games, and helped numerous PS3 devs, the situation is a little more complicated then that.
The PS2 had *blazing* fast VRAM bltblt copies. Yes, the cpus (EE, SPU, IOP, VU0, VU1) were a complete bitch to write for, but it was a beautiful site to behind when everything was working.
While the PS2 had a completely broken Z-Test (who the hell QA'd this??), it was ahead of its time. It predicted multi-core architecture that (game) devs had to embrace sooner or later. The Xbox with its unified memory definitely made things WAY easier then the complicated PS2.
The PS3 with its 6 SPU's of only 128KB each (!) forced developers to break the game up into "small jobs". It highlighted the problems of C++ OOP -- that it doesn't scale, and that you NEED to use DOD (Data Orientated Design) in order to achieve high performance. So while the PS2 and PS3 were "batshit insane" it had unintended benefit -- help move developers to embrace the "multi-core DOD" future.
On Xbox developers were typically CPU bound, while on PS3 developers were typically GPU bound.
The problem with the success of PS2 and failure of the PS3 was that Sony forgot what business they were in!? They were NOT a hardware manufacturer, but an entertainment company. It cost them 4 years of being in the red with the PS3 to remember this fact.
Sony moving to x86 for the PS4 allowed them to use "commodity" parts & pricing. Make things _easy_ for the developer and you'll get more/better games, or at least that was their justification.
So while I agree that yes x86 game devs tend to be lazy compared to console devs, the x86 guys had a valid point:
* Why is the hardware SO complicated?
The battle between fast & rigid and slow & flexible is never an easy one to answer.