Sony Makes It Hard To Develop For the PS3 On Purpose 616
adeelarshad82 writes "CNet reports on a bizarre comment from Sony's Computer Entertainment CEO in response to complaints from developers on how hard it is to develop games for the Playstation 3. '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?' Given that games heavily drive console sales, and the fact that the PS3 is already 8 million units behind the Xbox 360, I think making a developer's job harder is the last thing Sony needs."
Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want (Score:3, Interesting)
I think this is quite a valid strategy. It's liek Visual Basic, it turns application development into a drag and drop excercise. Anyone can do it, even people who don't really understand programming! However that results in Visual Basic getting a bad reputation because anything that's written by bad programmers is going to end up a bit shoddy. Sony don't want their console associated with shoddy games. They'd prefer that only decent programmers create games for their system.
In Defence of Sony... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think what the CEO making the comment did a poor job of communicating. Also, the article title is a bit misleading.
I believe Sony aims to make a new architecture, which RESULTS it being hard to program for. But the beauty of a new architecture is that it can be very powerful if done right. And why not? You're aiming to get 10 years out of it (in PS3's case) and the hardware ain't gonna change.
Now to put things in perspective, I remember a comment being made about how in the PS1 era developers wanted more access to the hardware. Then came the PS2, which in the end was a little bit more to the metal then developers hoped for.
They then commented they wanted something easier.
So based on what I know about the PS3 (new architecture, but with lots of middleware), I think Sony has achieved this.
Is it still hard? Yes. Will developers get a grip on it and realize it's full potential? Quite possible.
Pure Spin (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a case of pure spin combined with a lack of english skills. Here's what he was trying to say:
"Our hardware is so powerful that *of course* it's hard to develop for. So to use the most advanced hardware in the world, only the smartest developers will take advantage of it".
That kind of spin may play in Japanese markets, but it just sounds dumb to everyone else.
Forth (Score:3, Interesting)
From the DDJ article, this looks like an interesting machine for which to develop a Forth engine. How do I get one of these?
Just when you think they can't make things worse. (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow. Just when you thing they can't shoot themselves in the foot again. (Hasn't Sony run out of feet?)
Apple gets it, see the App Store for the iPhone. Microsoft gets it, they really focus on wooing developers.
Hopefully this was an idea lost in translation. If he said "Its not easy to develop for because if we focus on that, then it wouldn't be the console with the most FLOPS."; then I could deal with.
Sony losses money on the console. They need titles to make money on the over all project. To get titles they need developers. They need a VERY low cost PS3 developer boot camp to teach the tricks of the console and to encourage developers to write more games.
Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah but then you go to nintendo.com and you read the exact-opposite (quoted from memory): "We made the Nintendo 64 too difficult to develop games, and therefore they made the Gamecube easy to program." The Wii is probably extremely-easy, since it's essentially a Cube with some improved specs. Wii's at the top of the pile as the best-selling unit.
Previous #1 console: Were they easy to program relative to their competitors?
PS2 - no.
PS1 - yes.
SNES - no.
NES - yes.
Atari VCS - no.
I guess there's no real pattern there; it's rather random.
Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Make development easy
2. Deny publication rights for games that suck
3. ???
4. Profit!
Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want (Score:5, Interesting)
"Real programmers" love Visual Basic. It enables them to fulfil their customers' requests a lot quicker. Rather than spending a week in C they can spend a few hours in VB. This means happier customers, and more revenue.
The only ones that think Visual Basic has a bad reputation are kids in bedrooms that think there's some inherent value in using the lowest level language available, rather than the right tool for the job. VB isn't by any means the right tool for all jobs, but it is the right one for quite a few.
As for the actual topic, I agree with the others that feel this was just a very poorly phrased way of saying the architecture makes it complicated, but that it will pay off in the end. Having said that, the Sony person seems to equate "powerful hardware" with "difficult to develop for". That seems ridiculous.
Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want (Score:2, Interesting)
PS1 and PS2 had the same development learning curve.
In the early PS1 days, a lot of people used the Sony provided libraries from the SDK.
As time went by, studios learned to master the hardware and use the limited resource more efficiently.
Same thing happened with PS2.
If they didn't want this to happen with PS3, I suspect they would have chosen a more conventional architecture and learned from what would have been the "mistakes" of two generations of consoles.
Some facts. (Score:4, Interesting)
1. The Xbox 360 was release a year before the PS3 and with that year head start it gained around 7 million users. If you trust Microsoft they sold 10 million the first year! So given that it was around 7 million units sold. The 360 and the PS3 have been selling around the same amount from launch.
2. The Wii is also hard to develop for yet it is selling at around a 2 to 3 times clip of the 360 and PS3.
3. The guy's point was that they could make a system that is easier to develop for at the cost of longevity. In short he is saying to get a 10 year lifespan Sony had to go with something like the Cell and it's 8 SPE's. It is harder to develop for than one core but the payoff over time is worth it. Developers (myself included) are being pushed now to a different style of development and the days of more GHZ every year or so are over. The days of more cores/SPE's are here to stay.
Now my opinion. Sony included a HD, BluRay and Blue Tooth in every console. This was expensive, and a high risk; specifically including BluRay. Will it pay off? Who knows, and given the depression that the U.S. is probably going to hit (given the latest budget bill), disposable income will be very tight. However, BluRay is now the defacto standard for HD movies because of the PS3. What media will the next Xbox use? What about the next Nintendo? Will it be download only? Try telling gamestop, Wallmart, and the other retailers that they won't be selling games at their stores any more... Let the nuclear war begin. Did anyone see what happened when Sony released Warhawk online and in the store?
Sony decided to go with Nvidia and include 256MB of video memory and 256MB of System RAM. In my belief this was the mistake. Then again I realize that they couldn't make a $1,000 console. If it was me I probably would have scrapped BluRay and added more RAM. I would have then kept the cost around the same, released the same time as the 360. I would have also made a version of Linux the default OS for the system.
Now all three consoles have some great games (my opinion again). Nintendo owns the kids and casuals, but their 3rd party support can't seem to crack large sales numbers. The 360 has a good user base even with the greater than 30% hardware failure rate of the system. The $200 price tag is helping the system a ton. Yet that is the problem for the future in that the $200 system is lacking a HD and thus developers can't rely on it. Sony also has a nice install base but has one HUGE problem. Price. At $400-$500 it is priced out of the market of normal people. "If" Sony gets the price down to $300 soon then they should be fine. By fine I mean they will compete nicely with the other consoles this year.
Lastly, It is apparent to me that Microsoft is a software company (30% failure rate!), Sony is a hardware company (development kits are not that good), but the hardware is the best, and Nintendo is a game company.
Remember, folks... (Score:3, Interesting)
... this is precisely the same (Sony) mindset that gave breech birth to Sony's rootkit DRM and Sony's pointlessly proprietary Memory Stick format, etc, etc, etc.
This is a company so irretrievably mired in proprietary thinking that it will be a miracle if it survives the coming revolution. Sony will likely wither and die rather than adapt to the emerging open source "standard". To steal a word from the Obama Revolution:
Open Source == transparency
I don't think the forces of greed can stop the revolution this time. Either ya get on board this love train or get left behind! Are ya listening, Sony?
Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want (Score:2, Interesting)
However, Visual BASIC, the specific language? Ugh.
I used to program in old-school BASIC, but haven't used it for years... now, used to languages with C-derived syntax, VB seems horribly clunky and not easy to use, as basically used to be (supposedly).
Basically, I'm guessing VB was originally designed for people who were familiar with BASIC because back then it was "easier" than hard languages like C (and probably wasn't being used for such major projects that its inappropriateness wasn't such a problem).
I'd guess that it then retained BASIC style syntax over the years because it's what they were used to, even if it was clunky and now no easier to learn from scratch than C-syntaxed OO languages like C# if you weren't "locked in" to the BASIC way of doing things.
Fortunately, VB finally seems to be dying with the advent of
You thought the PS3 was hard? Try a mobile (Score:1, Interesting)
Try programming for the iPhone or Android, and you'll see how quickly things become hard to program.
See in C, you just do stuff, but OBJC you have to do stuff and tell sub processes to do stuff. And your app dies the second the user gets a phone call, etc.
In Java (which is the android) you have... um xml and Java, and... what the hell is it doing??? Good god most of the SDK has no documentation. I was happy to run back to the iPhone.
I would have been much happier to program either of these devices in straight C, but because both of the devices have to run threaded and behave well with other applications, nope, can't monopolize the resources. :p
Re:Number of reasons to make a console difficult (Score:4, Interesting)
Nobody has yet brought out a game that takes full power of the PS3. That's just like Metal Gear Solid 3 that brought HDR lightning, shaders, cool post-processing effects, briliant animation and a shitload of polygons to the PS2; it takes time.
What happens with the Xbox360? Developpers are taking the fullest out of the Xbox360 and therefore it will not, ever, bring you better graphics, so the lifetime of that console is about to run out.
Graphics on the PS3 will just keep on improving as the console gets cheaper and cheaper and in the end makes more revenue for Sony that the Xbox360 for Microsoft. Believe me when I say that the Xbox360 support will just drop like a stone when the next Xbox comes out, just like the Xbox1 when the 360 came out, while the PS3 will just like the PS2 be supported for many years.
How expensive was the PS2 when it was released? Yup... See what a succes that became?
Re:cell programming (Score:5, Interesting)
I also suspect that because the Cell is a new architecture with much longer "legs" they can design the PS4 as an incremental improvement over the PS3. Essentially a PS3 with a faster Cell and perhaps a full compliment of cores, more memory, throw in a possibly better graphics chip.
If they follow this strategy (which is very likely) then:
1) The PS4 would probably need a shorter development cycle since it would be an "evolutionary" hardware increase similar to spec-ing out a new PC, not a "revolutionary" increase like going from the PS2 to the PS3.
2) The PS4 would probably be able to have direct backward compatibility "built in" similar to the PS2 supporting PS1 hardware.
3) Any expertise a company gained with PS3 programming would be directly applicable to the PS4.
Nintendo's Wii2 should be fine from a hardware standpoint (bump the specs a bit more, maybe include low end HD graphics, but keep things "lite").
MS on the other hand have saddled themselves with a multi-core PowerPC architecture, that even Apple was moving aware from in their competition with MS. Which it may have worked for this generation of console, I wonder how expandable the design would be for the NEXT generation.
this policy could have made sense (Score:2, Interesting)
Basic ides: If the PS3 is sufficently unique it won't be worth the effort to port it to other consoles. A future looking architecture is a many core system, and we can continue, with the PS4 to use a better version of said new architecture.
Bad assumption: All of the PS2 devs who were exclusive would stay that way.
Bad business: Not paying for exclusives. If sony had opened up the wallet and left the 360 with Halo as it's only real platform exclusive the PS3 would be doing much better. Losing FF13 and GTA (as exclusives) was a really bad move on their part, there are other titles too.
Bad technology: The PS3 is marginally more powerful than the 360, but in the wrong area. nVIDIA is mostly right on this, any half decent CPU is fast enough for whatever you want to do. The Cell is an expensive CPU design, which even fully utilized doesn't add a whole lot to the gameplay experience. The conole also launched a year after the 360, it should have been significantly more powerful. Sony would have made their lives much easier if they had put 2GiB of memory in the system and a variant on the 8800 rather than 7800, then a game written for the PS3 would in some respects be clearly better than its 360 counterpart. Developers would be able to easily exploit some of that power (notably RAM), and customers would see a real tangible benefit.
Other bad technical: The hard drive used is a notebook drive. This adds no functionality, but increases cost. One can argue blu-ray until you're blu in the face, it at least adds functionality, and IMO is a big contributor to why blu ray won the format war. But the hard drive...just wtf? Stripping BC from later consoles was really bad too. I just got Killzone2, in anticipation I went and played through Killzone 1 again, to get a feel for the world again. Try doing that on a new PS3
Where to go in future: Sony needs to launch a PS4 the moment dx11 is finalized, and hope MS isn't doing the same. A PS4 with 28 cell processor, 4 GiB of ram and a directx11 compatible video card. It would be fully BC with the current PS3, relatively easy to develop for when going from the PS3 development, and be so clearly better than the Xbox360. MS has a problem, their architecture died and became the Cell. They could go back to intel/AMD (like the xbox) but that pretty much tosses BC. They have the clear advantage in dev tools and being behind a lot of DX11. But then is the Xbox3 going to be "Now with the cell and blu ray"? That's not going to make for good marketting. If they go the "Now with an intel CPU" route they're back to competing with themselves on the PC. MS also has a harder time justifying a new console, they're sort of winning, but not making much money. Making another huge investment in console R&D in that position would be unpopular. Sony is losing, they want to stop losing, that justifies more money.
The Atari Jaguar had this problem... (Score:1, Interesting)
they included a Motorola 68k that was suppose to be used for input handling. Programmers ended up using it to port their Genesis code directly to the Jaguar and the console became a Sega Genesis with a bigger color palette.
Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want (Score:5, Interesting)
MS essentially walked into the marketplace because programming for the XBox was easy if the game had a Windows version. Ease of programming=more games and better games.
Ouch. Yes, I'd say you are correct and I agree with you. Unfortunately, this has also resulted in games being programmed for the Xbox then ported to Windows. This leaves you with clunky interfaces and bugs that are nearly unbelieveable. One good example of this is GTA4. Designed with the Xbox in mind, it's been hell for anyone trying to run it under Windows.
This isn't to say that there isn't hope. I'm just hoping developers will start paying some attention and realize that a console UI isn't fit for computers and the amount of bugs is just unacceptable.
Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:In Defence of Sony... (Score:4, Interesting)
Other "actual developers" have not had this problem by designing their engine for the PS3 and then porting it to the 360 instead. Have a chat with the guys at Criterion about Burnout: Paradise, why don't you?
Targeting the PS3 as your primary platform helps make your code work smarter from day one, and actually makes it more efficient on the 360 as well.
Re:cell programming (Score:5, Interesting)
"MS on the other hand have saddled themselves with a multi-core PowerPC architecture, that even Apple was moving aware from in their competition with MS."
Apple moved away because IBM repeatedly failed to produce a low-power G5 suitable for laptop / notebook PCs. Being stuck with the ageing and increasingly anaemic-looking G4 line for portables was making Apple's offerings look worse in comparison with the competition every year, so Jobs eventually got fed up with being made to look like an idiot by repeatedly promising things that IBM said would be Available Real Soon(TM), and then failed to deliver.
NB: the Cell microprocessor is a member of the IBM POWER line, so Sony are just as saddled with the PowerPC architecture as MS (and indeed Nintendo).
Reverse Conspiracy Theory (Score:4, Interesting)
This reminds me a lot of some nonsense Charles Petzold wrote in an early edition of "Programming Windows". As you'd expect, he starts with a "hello world" example. One expects such a basic program to be maybe a half-dozen lines, with only a line or two of logic, and the rest syntactic sugar. But Petzold's example covers almost two pages and is extremely dense and complicated code. And while this example is a little less elegant than it could be, there's not actually a lot you can do to make it shorter. He explains this by claiming that the Windows API is extremely powerful, and you can't have power without complexity.
Obvious nonsense. Powerful development environments hide the complexity behind simple idioms. The real problem is that the developers who created the Windows APIs simply didn't bother to think through the use cases that programmers would have to deal with. (To be fair, early Mac and X Window APIs were even worse.) Petzold, out of loyalty to the environment he's documenting, rationalizes this problem away.
Hirai is sort of making the same argument, but only as an afterthought. His main argument is a sort of reverse conspiracy theory, that making the platform hard to program for will has some weird positive benefit. Not clear what he thinks that benefit is — he probably doesn't know himself! In any case, he's just doing a lame "we meant to do that" rationalization.
Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want (Score:3, Interesting)
Yup, VB is the scripting language of choice for the GUI dependent Windows world... lord knows I did more than a few things with it that could be done with bash, etc. on a *nix system.
Also, in the pre-server side scripting language days (before PHP, etc) it was also relatively easy to do basic CGI stuff with it...
Re:cell programming (Score:4, Interesting)
You are absolutely correct that MS, Sony and Nintendo are all using the PowerPC architecture in their consoles (hence the reason people say IBM was the one who really "won" this generation), but MS is using the PowerPC chip as each of its cores in its multi-core design. Increasing its power while keeping the same architecture would mean increasing the number of PowerPC cores, or increasing the core's efficiency (either through design or clock speed). I thought one of the reasons that Apple left
Nintendo is irrelevant to this discussion since I believe they could easily bump the current Wii's specs considering how "underpowered" most consider their design compared to the PS3 and 360.
Sony is using the PowerPC chip as the main core to handle scheduling of the Cell's SPUs (the PPE), but most of the heavy lifting for the PS3 is accomplished in threads for the SPUs. Upping the speed and number of the SPUs should translate into a bump in speed (or increasing the number of Cell chips used), all of which could be done without directly affecting the need to significantly change the PPE.
As it is existing PS3s only use six of the eight SPUs on a Cell due to initial poor yeilds with one SPU reserved for the OS, increased yields would probably put an extra SPU available to developers. IBM has also announced that it is going to be moving the Cell to a 45nm Fab and has announced quite a few roadmap improvements to the existing architecture without requiring a huge amount of design for a whole new platform.
Re:Number of reasons to make a console difficult (Score:5, Interesting)
This is why the Wii is dominating, it is focusing more on what makes games fun rather then proclaiming that they can put 34234234234234 scaling and rotating polygons on the screen all rendering withing
Graphics != A good game. Sure, I'd rather have a game with good graphics then not, but really, if the same game was on the Wii, PS3, and 360 I'd pick the one that had the most content and best controls rather then the best graphics.
Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want (Score:1, Interesting)
I followed the development of the PS3 pretty closely and this has been the Sony mantra for a very long time. In fact, you can call this story old news. Ancient news.
It goes all the way back to the original Playstation. Sony discovered the system had a lot longer shelf life because the games got progressively better over time. Really, the differences between the first and final generation games are dramatic.
With the PS2, the system was even more difficult to program. Vector processors? That was insane! And you got the same effect. A long lived system with huge differences between the first and final generation.
It's the formula that seemed to be working for Sony since they got in the business.
The problem with the PS3 is all component selection, not developer toolchain. The components were too exotic for manufacture pushing the release back, decreasing yields, increasing costs, and increasing cooling demand thereby increasing case size.
When you're paying $900 in components for a device that's supposed to cost $400, but you have to sell it for $600 a full year after your competitor has already been on the market at a lower price point, you're fucked. That's all there is to it.
Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe, but you can get a USB key for $10 [pccanada.com], and that's not even bulk pricing.
Re:Remember, folks... (Score:1, Interesting)
Those aren't relevant examples, as each division of Sony operates mostly independently. The PS3 is the most standards capable console on the market.
The PS3 supports atrac and mp3, mp4, avi/divx, most image formats, standard FAT filesystem, uses a standard laptop hard drive, uses standard USB ports for drive and controller connections, supports running linux, some versions have memory stick slots, but also include SD and CF slots too. The controllers are standard Bluetooth connections.
Nothing on the 360 is more than marginally better, and they're much worse about format lock in.
Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want (Score:3, Interesting)
The 360 does not blindly have 'the better games' in any way at all.
This is firstly a completely and utterly subjective thing.
Secondly, something which 360 gamers seem to blindly forget (time and time again) is that NOT EVERYONE OWNS A 360!
So right now there are PS2 / Xbox1 / GC owners who are looking for a new console, don't blindly assume they have a 360 and the PS3 offers no value.
About half of the 360's good games are ALREADY ON the PS3, as they are cross platform.
About half of the remaining half are coming out on the PC also....... or already out
The remaining 25% of the 360's good games are truely exclusive to the 360.
That being said, of course half of the PS3's great games are cross platform and also on 360, logically of course.
I am tired of having to defend my purchase of the PS3 to people blindly assuming 'everyone has a 360, why get a PS3?'
I am getting a perfectly satisfactory experience on PSN for free, some may argue the 360's cost of live is cheap but as a 'hard-casual' gamer (less than 30 hours online a year but I do play mainstream blockbusters all the time) - why the heck should I pay 50$ a year for online?
Also the PS3 is SIGNIFICANTLY quieter than the 360 is, before the option to load to HDD (NXE) the 360 was frankly, a god damned abomination of noise in my loungeroom, I was glad to sell it.
Overall I'm very very happy with my purchase and if anything, Microsoft need to woo me in to re-buy another 360.
Gears bored me senseless, why I don't know but it did, it's a shame as I'd heard so much positive about it.
I loathe Halo as one of the most over-rated franchises of all times.
Fable 2 they completely stuffed the movement, animation and camera code compared to the original >:( I found this not fun either (damnit!)
Finally Forza 3,... well this is something I want pretty bad.
Re:In Defence of Sony... (Score:2, Interesting)
That would have been nice, except we had 360 devkits a YEAR before we had ps3 documentation. It's hard to make a game when everyone has a 360 on their desk and there are THREE ps3 devkits in the company for the first year. Oh, the 360 had an excellent development environment from day one and the ps3 is STILL weak. Also the early ps3 devkits sounded like jet engines so everyone hated to have them turned on. Way to make us want to use them!
Just for the record, asymmetric multiprocessing sucks. Especially when almost NONE of your datasets fit into the SPU memory (256K), let alone the code to process it. There are few game related tasks (besides graphics) that take well to a streamed architecture.
The people who designed the cell architecture knew NOTHING about programming games (read the book 'The race for a new game machine') and it really shows. They went by what Sony told them and Sony really does suck at software. All of the good graphics APIs and tools were actually done by first party developers and then released to everyone else. Sony does develop them further but they had nothing to do with the design.
On a final note, when you have to burn 20%-50% of the SPU processing to lighten the GPU load so the PS3 can just barley KEEP UP with te 360's GPU you know it's crap.
Bah. I program the ps3 for a living and I really love the challenge but damn they chose poorly this time around.
Re:Call him Monkey Boy all you want (Score:1, Interesting)
It depends on how you look at it. Speaking as someone who did it for a short while, it was a horrible platform to develop for. You had no choice but to write horrible unmaintainable garbage. There wasn't any hardware for display lists, you had to code that yourself. Wait for the h-blank, update the registers, use the handful of cycles between the next h-blank to process the code for the next sequence, meaning that you wound up with only the vblank to do your game logic and sound.
If you wanted anything that actually approached a game you had to squeeze game logic into your drawing code, which was a problem because if the code ran long, even by a cycle, you miss the h-blank and the screen goes bananas.
The system was evolved from a jumped up pong machine and for doing games like that I suppose it was easy. But anything even remotely approaching what the modern sprites/tiles setups were doing was an absolute nightmare.
Much of Atari's downfall came from their inability to see that developers wanted sprites and tiles, hardware scrolling and dedicated sound processors. They were still perpetuating the silly draw lists style right up to the jaguar days, granted there was now hardware dedicated to it so that you weren't wasting precious CPU cycles babysitting the graphics. The benefits of that approach were negligible as everything it could do could be handled with ease by horizontal interrupts. This did mean your special hacks were consuming the CPU, but you typically needed far fewer than an architecture designed for one every line.