Sony made PS3 a pain in the ass…on purpose |
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| BY John Slefinger Mar. 2nd, 2009 | More on: |
Last week, we reported Shaun Himmerick’s comments regarding how difficult the PS3 was to develop for. Thanks to the way the cell processor was designed, said Himmerick, developing games for the PS3 was a “huge pain in the ass.” Now, according to The Digital Home, Sony responded to those comments in a recent interview with the Official Playstation Magazine. The results were as shocking as they were confusing.
OPM spoke with Kaz Hirai, the CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment — an authority if there is one. Hirai had this to say about the difficulty developers have with the PS3: “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?” Ok…
“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.”
*Scratches head*
So, to summarize, the PS3 was designed to be harder to program for…on purpose…so that developers would rise to the challenge, and somehow make better games. This genius plan neglects the universal fact that the videogame industry — like all others — is governed by inertia. People and companies avoid unnecessary challenges if they can. If this blog decided to publish everything in Mandarin to encourage readers to master the language, we wouldn’t create a utopian community of highly cultured viewers, we’d just lose all of them.
Sony created extra obstacles for developers. And by making things harder for the game developers that the PS3 depends on, Sony hampered its own system’s success. The PS3 is about 8 million units behind the 360, and Sony is trying to make its console a niche, high end product when it should be appealing to as many consumers as possible. The cell processor may be stronger than the Xbox 360’s, but if developers are refusing to deal with the hassle, the stronger hardware doesn’t mean anything.
March 2nd, 2009
at 10:30 am
That’s ridiculous and funny
March 2nd, 2009
at 10:30 am
with things like these, and the 2006 ridge racer fiasco i start to wonder, how hot Kazuo Hirai’s sisters should be for him to have landed that job.
March 2nd, 2009
at 11:00 am
Oh Kaz.. ^^
March 2nd, 2009
at 12:42 pm
It’s obviously not true. I don’t think Sony’s THAT retarded, but they can’t admit that the cumbersome development environment has been a thorn in their side until they release a new console, then they can look back and say “Yeah, that was a mistake.” Investors wouldn’t like an admission like that now. But Nintendo pulled the same thing with the GameCube.
March 2nd, 2009
at 3:08 pm
I completely agree with Tommy. Sony have made some pretty big errors with the PS3. I think they overestimated how the market would react. 10 years ago many were waiting for the PS2, but when the 360 is such decent competition I think Sony were a bit too cocky. Of course, they can’t admit it now though - that would be too humble :D
March 3rd, 2009
at 5:04 am
Hard to program for? When a small dev like Media Molecules could come up with an innovative IP for the PS3, I can’t see why a more experienced dev (Valve) would refuse to work with the PS3 due its strange architecture. In the end, the problem isn’t the hardware- it’s in the backroom dealing and politics and when you have two big companies like MS and Sony (I don’t consieder Wii much of a gaming console, it’s more like a toy), the reprecussion is that alliances are built and backstabbing ensues.
March 3rd, 2009
at 6:15 am
lol, you have a company bigshot admitting that “it’s hard to program for” (and this is far from the first time) and the fanboys still approach it via some strange logic and say hardware isn’t the issue. When it comes to exclusives, money is of course involved when making decision but that doesn’t mean hardware isn’t. It very much is. It’s just that some devs have chosen not to bother and spend the time they’d spend on the PS3 version doing something else.
April 22nd, 2009
at 2:24 pm
It seems that the Sony CEO believes that an easy system would encourage amateur developers and amateur games.
Of course, the opposite is actually true for two reasons:
- Experienced developers would prefer familiar programming approaches so they can port existing code, rather than starting from scratch.
- Newer developers are starting from scratch anyway, so they won’t be dissuaded.
Overall, this promotes obscure games and obstructs popular existing franchises.
It also seems like the Sony CEO was worried about developers making games that were all graphics and no substance.
In truth, making the graphics difficult to program backfires.
It means that developers will waste a lot of time just getting the graphics to work, leaving them with less time to program the rest of the game. Ironically, this is likely to result in less-polished games with less content.
It obstructs porting games from other systems to the PS3, thus obstructing most 3rd-party developers. Obviously, having fewer games devalues any game system.
The Sony CEO also implied that the difficulty was a trade-off of the PlayStation 3 being powerful.
At first, this seems plausible given its multiple processors.
However, the Xbox 360 has a tri-core Xenon processor. The multiple cores would essentially be like having 3 processors, so multiple processors is no excuse.
Easy is attractive.
You want to attract as many games to the system as possible.
Without games, it’s just a glorified DVD player.