Sony: PlayStation 3 is Hard to Develop for on Purpose

[refugium717]

Earlier this week, Shaun Himmerick, executive producer for "Wheelman" and employee at Midway, told the hosts of the "http://www.thisxboxlife.com/?p=1077" podcast that developing for the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 couldn't be any different.

"The politically incorrect answer is that the PS3 is a huge pain in the ass," Himmerick told the hosts.

"Anyone making a game, if you're going to make it for both, just lead on the PS3 because if it works on the PS3, it'll work on 360," he said. "We had to play catch-up on the PS3 because of the memory constraints and how it renders; how it processes is just different. And it's harder on the PS3," Himmerick continued.

A slew of well-known developers have spoken out against Sony's high-power console.

Valve's Gabe Newell said in 2007 -long before Sony's decline started- that the PlayStation 3 is a "waste of everyone's time." He went on to tell Edge Magazine that "investing in the Cell... gives you no long-term benefits. There's nothing there that you're going to apply to anything else. You're not going to gain anything except a hatred of the architecture they've created. I don't think it's a good solution."

A http://www.ddj.com/hpc-high-performance-computing/197801624 in the Dr. Dobb's Journal tested the development process of the PlayStation 3 and found that Sony's console is "difficult to program for." The report's authors went on to explain that "software that exploits the Cell's potential requires a development effort significantly greater than traditional platforms."

I looked for some Sony supporters and found the best source of them all: Kaz Hirai, CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment. He can explain this and settle this once and for all, right? Think again.

In one of the most shocking and bizarre comments ever made by a company chief, Hirai, the brains behind the entire PlayStation empire, explained to the Official PlayStation Magazine in its February issue that Sony didn't want to make it easy on developers.

"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?" explained Hirai.

Huh? But his explanation didn't end there.

"So it's a kind of -I wouldn't say a double-edged sword- but it's hard to program for," Hirai continued, "and a lot of people see the negatives of it, but if you flip that around, it means the hardware has a lot more to offer."

I won't debate that the PS3 may have "a lot more to offer," but I do take issue with Sony's justification for it. What good is a powerful console, if developers don't know how to get the most out of it? I simply don't see anything positive about making things too difficult on developers.

The video game industry is unique because hardware makers rely on third parties to be successful. The more games a console has, the more likely people will want it. But if development is too challenging for third parties, I'm hard-pressed to see how that will benefit Sony at all, even though developers can do more with the console.

Developers are looking at the installed bases of consoles. realizing that Microsoft has more units in the wild. Developers want to make their games as appealing as possible to those extra 8 million people. So spending extra time (a luxury most developers don't have) on PS3 development just plain doesn't make sense.

That's precisely why I haven't seen much difference in the games offered on both consoles. Sure, some look better on the PS3, but the difference is minor, and that's the only improvement I can see. I don't think developers are taking the Sony bait and working harder at harnessing the power of Sony's console. The incremental benefit of doing so, at least if we judge by what we've seen so far, simply isn't high enough for developers to follow Sony's plan.

I'm all for powerful consoles and getting the most out of gaming machines, but I don't understand Sony's strategy. Third-party developers are key to a successful gaming generation, and Sony makes it hard on them. And in Hirai's own words, people (ostensibly, developers) are seeing "negatives in it." That's not good.


More PlayStation 3 News...

[carbs77]

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"

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

[51N15T3R]

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.

[Kraken]

Originally Posted by 51N15T3R 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.

[Tsusai]

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.

[sorceror]

Originally Posted by Kraken 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.

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.