So, let me get this straight. Your strategy is to count on the fact that most devs can’t program your machine well, so that eventually the few uber developers ship OMG WTF titles by comparison and everyone beats down your door?
Problem is I don’t think it works like that. Devs on the 360 will continue to push that machine in all kinds of ways. I’d not want to bet against the ingenuity of 360 developers – if they max out the rendering pipeline, they’ll just start pushing on their world streaming, or dynamic AI, or some other frontier.
It’s not a given to me that a perfectly programmed PS3 is going to have much higher throughput than a perfectly programmed 360. From what I’ve heard, the 360’s theoretical max throughput is higher on some things than the PS3’s theoretical max throughput. The PS3 may be a monster at floating-point, but the 360 has better RAM accessibility (which is arguably more important for open-world games). Etc.
Anyway, Kaz is doing the best he can with his lemons, I’m sure, but his lemonade is a bit too tart for me.
The problem with this argument is when the competition releases an easy to program for platform that provides better looking games out of the gate and for at least two years running.
“It will be the better platform in another year or two, really!” Isn’t going to sell anyone on looks. Not when it’s also twice the freakin’ price.
Oh, also, developers like systems better when they can achieve their vision with minimal effort. Does sony think developers like that kind of shit? They are confusing cause and effect. Since the PS2 was a certain way and successful, they seem to believe that the fact that it was a shit environment was part of its success.
No. No it was not. Newsflash Sony: Devs are treating your system as the LCD. That’s not something to be proud of.
Snippet of conversation overheard in the office just yesterday:
360 programmer: “Is it really that hard? On the 360 we just have to do this.”
PS3 programmer: “Yeah well, the PS3 can’t do that, so we have to do this, and this, and this…”
Kaz is really bad at making what could’ve been a good point.
If Sony had made PS3 easy to get up to speed with, and then supplied a lot of extra power provided you get down to the metal, it would really work as he says.
This is how consoles used to be. You could get started ok, but it took a few years or longer to really get the best stuff out there, because there was so much you could do to get closer to the hardware level.
With today’s consoles, that doesn’t work so well, mainly because no one has time to get down to that level, but also because it’s so much easier to get competent looking product without doing it, especially on 360 and PC.
So now many devs won’t care to really investigate the PS3’s Ultimate Powah! because the userbase won’t be there to make it worthwhile and it’s a bitch just to get started.
I don’t know if LCD is the right term; the Wii is clearly the LCD if you include it. However, you very often hear, “get it to run on the ps3 first because if you can do that then it’ll run well on anything”, which is also not something to be proud of since it’s basically saying it takes more work to make something perform at a given level on ps3. So it’s definitely the CGE (Console of Greatest Effort :).
That said, and I say this sadly, since I’m a programmer, but ease-of-programming doesn’t appear to be very important to a platform’s success or failure. There are lots of counter examples on both sides of the argument, xbox1, ps2, etc. I wish it mattered more!
Chris
PS. And yes, if the ps3 market share dips enough relatively that the payback/pain-in-the-ass gets low enough, people will drop it like something they drop really fast. I think Sony probably already has enough consoles out there that they’re safe on this front this generation though, and if you’ve got to do both, then you might as well architect it at least partially for ps3 for the reasons above, since it will pay off (or at least not hurt you) on 360 and pc, where if you’re architecting for pc or 360 first, you’re in a world of pain if you have to port.
