Sony: PS3 is hard to develop for--on purpose
_270x270.jpg)
Sorry, but you're too hard to develop for.
(Credit: Sony)Earlier this week, Shaun Himmerick, executive producer for "Wheelman" and employee at Midway, told the hosts of the "This Xbox Life" 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 report 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.
Check out Don's Digital Home podcast, Twitter feed, and FriendFeed.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Kinda ironic, too... Sega Saturn's library suffered largely due to the complexity of developing on their platform, compared to the much more developer-friendly Playstation. Now, Sony's got the nightmare platform, and the historically overbearing Nintendo and corporate monolith Microsoft are the developer-friendly platforms? Whoda thunk it?
Quite simply, the only hard thing with Cell IS Timing.
I've looked over it, i've played around with virtual environments, it isn't *that* hard.
People who have gotten over the initial hurdles of Cell have came back and said they loved the thing and that it was easy.
There is a slight initial hurdle, no denying it, mainly to do with the jump from PPE to SPE, and jobs, but once that is done, it is just back to the same old timing problems.
If anything, i'd say Cell is even easier than Emotion Engine, i still can't get my head around that, due to it requiring Assembly, which i just haven't gotten around to learning yet.
Also, i laugh at Gabe, who even listens to him any more?
Coming from Valve, who created Source, possibly the worst engine ever, the amount of bugs in that thing boggles the mind... optimization sure isn't known around Valve... (don't even get me started on Hammer)
To summarize: PS3 > PS2 in development.
I was a big Sony guy, and after a year of nothing but the PS3 I couldn't take it anymore... the exclusives are far and few between and quite frankly aren't anything that stands above the 360. The online isn't comparable to LIVE by a long shot and the 360 has Netflix and more HD movies in their own movie service.....
I keep my PS3 for bluray and the occasional exclusive, that's it.
I'm no programmer, no developer or any other software engineer, but release a new, easier toolset, so more of the software does the hardwork for the developers.
Think of today's operating systems, all we do is click, drag and drop with the mouse, but immense data is being processed every second beneath the software layers. (I was speaking allegorically, I'm sure the current toolkits include clicking, dragging and dropping too). Try to accomplish that sense of comfort for the developers and more awesome games will come easily.
Am I simplifying things too much?
It's well known that ever increasing competition drives the best of games companies to excel on the consoles and even with the easiest development kits it takes a good five years for any company to know the hardware well enough to really be able to pull off something spectacular (with the exception of the Wii which is almost identical to the GameCube).
Only a complete idiot would genuinely believe that making console development harder is a good thing.
Thankyou Mr. Hirai. You have officially turned the PS3 into the Caviar of the developers world. You know, Caviar, the disgusting fish eggs that upper middle-class idiots buy and eat to impress other upper middle-class idiots because some genius with a lot of byproduct to get rid of managed to seed the idea that only a philistine could not appreciate them? "Oh, they're hideous, but so expensive, it must just be my uncultured tongue. I can't possibly admit that I'm uncultured."
I can see it now, The Caviar of Consoles!
The only problem was that they didn't take the current video game software architectures and programming patterns into account. So, instead of producing an architecture that supported the existing ways that developers knew how to code games, they addressed the problem by creating entirely different models of game programming. These new models are documented in IBM white papers on the cell technology.
Thing is, nobody wants to change the way they think about developing games, and many people still try to develop games using their past models. When they use their existing development patterns on the PS3, they are essentially leaving huge performance gains on the table.
And, if you're trying to do a cross-platform game, forget about it. For top performance, the PS3 really requires that you structure your program design of your game differently from the Xbox and Wii. The same techniques used on one family are not applicable to the other if you want to get maximum performance on every platform.
So, the developers say that the PS3 platform is too hard and the hardware engineers say that the developers need to think and program differently.
Who is right? Well, if the PS3 was the only game console in town, developers would be forced to learn a whole new way of game development. It would be the price of entry into the market. And it's probably what the cell processor engineers were counting on. But you currently have a situation where the two market leading consoles (Wii and Xbox) use the older model of programming, and developers don't want to learn a new way of doing things if they don't have to, and their existing game engine libraries work fine, so no one wants to change. And you can't blame them because there is actually greater financial incentive to stay with the current model.
by swiggins February 28, 2009 3:55 PM PST
I was a big Sony guy, and after a year of nothing but the PS3 I couldn't take it anymore... the exclusives are far and few between and quite frankly aren't anything that stands above the 360. The online isn't comparable to LIVE by a long shot and the 360 has Netflix and more HD movies in their own movie service.....
I keep my PS3 for bluray and the occasional exclusive, that's it.
Exactly! These devs are lazy as hell. Every ps3 exclusive looks and performs so much better then the 360 exclusives. MGS4, Killzone2, uncharted, heavy rain. Maybe it was a mistake for Sony to take this route, expecting devs to make great games instead of the crap they have been putting out since MS entered the game. I guess we shouldn't expect devs to create the best.
If we understand what MS has done with the 360 and XBL platform, is what MS has always done, recycled old tech and branded it new. XBL is simply windows messenger sitting atop networking stack and then they tied avatars to it. It was lacking in organization, so they relaunched recently to much acclaim, but its awfully similar now to competitors from Apple and Sony's media management.
Can i sum this all up, its simple quite frankly, devs are lazy. The same argument was used when the iPhone was first launched, why didn't you write it in Java? or C/++/# or something else other than this different thing than we have to learn. An lo and behold, for the people that took the time and learned and used guidelines, they have created successful apps and the iPhone is an unrivaled success. In a business where its all about flooding the stores with console titles, the 360 and Wii are flooded with hundreds, literal hundreds of CRAP titles. There arent hundreds of crap titles for the PS3, simply because they arent that many devs willing to lear, and develop to properly harness the environment.
- by sting7k February 28, 2009 6:37 PM PST
- I know what you do with the other 9.5 years, MAKE MORE AND BETTER GAMES. Damn Sony is crazy.
- Reply to this comment
-
-
Showing 1 of 5 pages (257 Comments)