Sony Admits Lack Of Developer Support

256w ago - The process for developing on the PS3 can be quite arduous... Sony have at last faced the awful truth that we have all known from the outset, that has given us a library of uninspired ports, frame rate issues and uninspired unique IP's: The difficulty in developing for the PS3 has driven away developers.

Sony themselves develop 30% of the consoles titles, leaving the rest to third party developers who had begun developing a year earlier for the Xbox 360. With the ease of working with the 360 and the exorbitant costs associated with the PS3, this left most AAA titles merely being ports rather than taking advantage of the superior hardware buried deep inside.

In a manner very unlike Sony, Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony Worldwide has come out and admitted to the problem and attempted to address it with the community.

Mr Yoshida said: "Sometimes we struggle to convince them (third-party publishers) to put more resources into the PS3."

He added: "We know there's a lot more that we can do, and with the massive growth of the industry we understand that third party publishers have so many choices, many more than they have resources."

Mr Yoshida told GamesIndustry.biz: "Because the 360 hardware was out earlier, the games were built based on 360 architecture. But still, they must have been planning to...release (the PS3 game) at the same time with the same quality. So they massively underestimated the effort that was needed to re-architect the game to property take advantage of the PS3's multi-core architecture."

In a machine that was always built with the future in mind and completely disregarding the present, the company is pinning its hopes on Blu-ray technology.

He said: "Timing-wise the unfortunate situation for the PS3 was that it didn't come out after a few years of the Blu-ray learning curve...so we had massive amounts of work to do and that really hit the profitability of the company.

"We tried as much as possible not to pass that cost on to consumers, but we do feel that the early adapters of the PS3 are getting good value (with the integrated Blu-ray)".

With only one truly great game released we have seen console sales jump through the roof. Sony fans, and indeed gaming fans in general, are hoping that something can be done to allow delevopers to learn the hardware and have it cost effective to release unique versions across all platforms.

In the meantime, I can be found indented into my lounge, beer and wireless controller at the ready and voice chatting to my friend over Xbox Live.