Kaz: We intentionally made it hard to program PS3

SC_Wolf

#1 – 1:06 PM March 1, 2009

What do you do for the other nine and a half years?

Oh, I don't know, enjoy a flood of kickass games made by developers who were able to devote 100% of their energy into making their game the absolute best it could be instead of wasting resources trying to figure out how to get around needless, obfuscating roadblocks that have been put in place to keep them from tapping the platform's full potential?

Just a thought.

Anonymous Anonymous

#2 – 1:14 PM March 1, 2009

My understanding was that the PS3 was made difficult to program for in an effort to discourage games being moved from the PS3 to any other platforms. That is, Sony anticipated being the primary platform this generation as they were last generation, and wanted to solidify that by making most developers unwilling to port their code after having made their game work on the "primary" platform. This has of course turned around and bitten them in the ass, but it very well could have happened the other way around given a more competitive launch window for the PS3.

Inverse Square

#3 – 1:31 PM March 1, 2009

Sorry, the quote is right there. They didn't "intentionally make it hard" to program for the PS3, they just didn't _go out of their way_ to make it "easy to program for". The unspoken implication being that if they had, they might have compromised some of the capabilities. I'm no big sony fan, but this is making a bit of a jump.

lecti

#4 – 1:35 PM March 1, 2009

Brilliant. I wish I can say the same thing about my application and not get fired.

Felix Mitchell

#5 – 2:04 PM March 1, 2009

Inverse Square:

If they didn't choose to make it easy, they've chosen to make it hard. Simple as.

They had to make the development environment usable, so why not make it more usable? Why stop where they did?

I think they want games to appear to be getting better over the life of the console, and think this can't be achieved with a static piece of equipment, so they've put obsticals in the way of developers.

It's a dumb idea that SONY could make a perfect console 'if they wanted to' and developers wouldn't be able to squeeze something new from it a decade later.

Anonymous Anonymous

#6 – 2:27 PM March 1, 2009

"It's Ridge Racer! Riiiiiidge Racer!" explained Hirai.

Raian

#7 – 2:48 PM March 1, 2009

9 years: you slowly go out of business.

Anonymous Anonymous

#8 – 8:48 PM March 1, 2009

That is one bizarre quote. Wow.

Just as a side note ( I'm def not a fanboy of either console ) developing for the 360 is pretty much like developing most DirectX things. MS is obviously a software company first and they've built on that to give great dev tools. They'd have to go out of their way to make it difficult.

Anonymous Anonymous

#9 – 12:58 AM March 2, 2009

Felix: Making a very easy to use development environment is a difficult task, and the easier to use it gets (API wise), the harder it becomes to tap into the potential of the console. From my experience of developing for the PS3, I wouldn't really call it 'hard', just different.

RobinClarke

#10 – 3:48 AM March 2, 2009

He was probably refering to the fact that Sony's design philosophy with each of the Playstation consoles has been to provide lots of generalised processing power and letting developers figure out how best to use it rather than implementing specialised, single-purpose features in hardware. Resulting in games like Shadow of the Colossus and God of War on the PS2, which implemented effects that weren't hadn't been used in games (or in some cases even invented) at the time the hardware was being designed.

That this approach hasn't paid off in the same way for the PS3 is more down to the fact that it's competing for developer attention with two other popular platforms - where developers have been able to work natively on the PS3 the results have been technically much stronger than multiplatform equivalents (compare CoD4/5 and Killzone 2).

But I guess you can't get a cheap laugh out of that.

Inverse Square

#11 – 5:15 AM March 2, 2009

If anyone's wondering, the article this comes from is equally misrepresentative, even though the guy writing it apparently did the interview. Nowhere does it give the context of this stuff having come from Sony's confidence, and nowhere does it say that Sony went out of their way to make the PS3 hard to program for. If they had invested zillions in making better development tools, the design process would be longer and the products would be more expensive.

I don't think that there's anything inherently cool about pacing graphical upgrades either, but there's a difference between "we put in roadblocks to make sure plebians and poor people couldn't design for it" and "we didn't do much of our own software design because, among other things, it's difficult to bring out all the potential of a console all at once."

ifriit

#12 – 3:31 PM March 3, 2009

The answer to Mr. Hirai's question is "win."

You'd think Sony would have people in charge who knew that.