Sony: PlayStation 3 is Hard to Develop for on Purpose

I'll have a stab in the dark at this one, maybe Hirai is thinking something along the lines of...

"if it's hard to develop for, the only the truly skilled developers will produce software and therefore we will have better software for our platform and so we win" :confused:

But that's the only positive thing I could think of :cool:

Yeah it's a little old for developers to still be saying it's "hard" or a "pain in the ass" to develop for the PS3. They need to adapt and "get smarter" or shut up. They like the 360 because it's like a PC and easy to program for and that's why we see the same games time after time, no innovation. Plain and simple they are just lazy and expect people to settle for it.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to make a 3D video game, let alone one that can be considered next gen? Now take that difficulty and make it needlessly more difficult by throwing in multiprocessing for 8 cores and severe memory restrictions plus Sony refusing to document parts of their hardware or providing decent middleware.

Its like if you had to go through an obstacle course on the way to your kitchen. It would take you 3-4 times as long to get there, but that doesn't mean you are slow or stupid, it simply means you have to jump through pointless hoops to get there.

As for the lack of innovation, familiarity sells, and when games cost millions of dollars to make, a single game not selling can bankrupt your company (see Haze). Though the PS3's difficulty adds to that cost, the real problem is the emphasis on graphics. For the cost of just the shadow engine in a modern game, they could have probably made 8 SNES titles each with better gameplay, storyline and music than most current gen games. I think with XBLA, PSN and XNA, that we could see innovation return though. Those games cost less to make and less to buy, so experimentation is possible.

The traditional way (for lack of better phrasing) is when you have a game, it is a memory intensive game (Crysis is a good one). You load a bunch of stuff into memory and work from there. Now, the PS3 was designed differently. It has 256MB of ram, BUT to offset that low count, that memory is crazy high data speed Rambus.

The ability to add/remove data off the memory buffer is faster than anything in a desktop computer (3.2GHz to 8.0GHz compared to current 800MHz to 1066MHz). With that in mind, a game programmer has to decide what needs to be in memory, how long they need it, and free it ASAP so that more stuff can be placed in. This, to me, is a better programming model.

Okay, some of that is deserved - Sony's not famous for providing the best development tools - but "multiprocessing for 8 cores" is not "needlessly more difficult". It's more difficult, but needfully.

What Hirai appears to be trying to say is that the PS3 is harder to develop for because it's more advanced hardware. The Cell (and the PS3 system as whole) can do a heck of a lot - there are plenty of FLOPS laying around in there - but people are still learning how best to use all those SPUs. (As a pipeline? As a scheduled set of task processors?)

The PS2 was pretty odd, architecturally, and it's amazing what was eventually coaxed out of it. I suspect the PS3 is capable of similar amazement, but it'll take time and experience to get there. People will learn tricks on the 360, too, but the curve will be a lot shallower, and it won't go to a high a peak as on the PS3. I suspect the last games for the 360 won't look that much better than the first ones, whereas the later games for the PS3 will probably look like they come from a different hardware generation than the first ones, like on the PS2.

But the PS2 had the advantage of being the most popular console, the PS3 doesn't have that going for it. Hopefully it'll get the chance to mature. Sony probably should do what it can to help developers along - better developer support and middleware being the main things they can do. But those require investment... in this economy. We'll see.