PlayStation Is Hard To Work With, Devs Say (kotaku.com) 42
After yesterday's industry-wide discussion of the cost of being visible on Sony's PlayStation Store, Kotaku has heard from multiple independent developers and publishers expressing similar frustrations and fury. From a report: There were two main responses to our article yesterday highlighting one independent developer's frustrations with working with Sony to sell games on the PlayStation store. The first was a confusing number of people convinced that this was somehow part of an underground conspiracy to destroy Sony. The second was many indie game developers and publishers getting in touch to say that, yes, wow, Sony are far harder to work with and sell games through than anywhere else.
It's not possible to rationalize with the former group. We had confirmed hard figures on Sony's fees for getting any visibility on the PlayStation's in-built store, so we reported them. The conspiracy, disappointingly, ends there. However, the information about just how much worse it is for indies to work with Sony than Microsoft or Nintendo keeps piling in. "Oh yeah, so there's Nintendo who supports you," one such response begins. "[Then] Microsoft who supports you and [then] there is Sony who supports its own AAA machine and gives a fuck about everyone else."
As Bloomberg reported in April, Sony shows extraordinary caution even with the games it makes itself, with an obsessive focus on blockbuster success. According to that article, the Japanese corporation is moving away from developing smaller in-house games, so fixated are they on only the largest games. It seems this lack of interest in smaller titles extends to third-party developers attempting to sell their games on the system. "Sony does not understand what indie means," an independent publisher tells me under the condition of anonymity, via Twitter DMs. "Not at all. For them indie is something in the lower million budgets."
It's not possible to rationalize with the former group. We had confirmed hard figures on Sony's fees for getting any visibility on the PlayStation's in-built store, so we reported them. The conspiracy, disappointingly, ends there. However, the information about just how much worse it is for indies to work with Sony than Microsoft or Nintendo keeps piling in. "Oh yeah, so there's Nintendo who supports you," one such response begins. "[Then] Microsoft who supports you and [then] there is Sony who supports its own AAA machine and gives a fuck about everyone else."
As Bloomberg reported in April, Sony shows extraordinary caution even with the games it makes itself, with an obsessive focus on blockbuster success. According to that article, the Japanese corporation is moving away from developing smaller in-house games, so fixated are they on only the largest games. It seems this lack of interest in smaller titles extends to third-party developers attempting to sell their games on the system. "Sony does not understand what indie means," an independent publisher tells me under the condition of anonymity, via Twitter DMs. "Not at all. For them indie is something in the lower million budgets."
Makes sense (Score:2)
2 MB RAM and a 33.8688 MHz R3000 are pretty constraining nowadays.
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But conversely was much easier to program than the Saturn with it's bastardized microcontroller SMP with hardware-assisted mutexes controlling the memory bus at the time (a concept they took from the equally painful SGI POWER series). Sony seems to forget that it was their simplistic architecture and the uncomplicated/inexpensive devkits that were accessible to anyone who wanted one that got them the traction they needed to eat away at Sega's market share.
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I think the most important fact between PSX and Saturn is that Sony made a 3D console, and Sega made a 2D console.
Sega made the best 2D console ever, but people were awed by 3D games and wanted that.
Look it up, the Saturn can't do 3D, everything you see on it is only sprites (rectangular shapes, no triangles) that are twisted to fake 3D.
How it is possible for the pioneer of 3D arcade games, the maker of Virtua Racing on home console, to make its new generation console 2D only? One of the most impressive fk-
Re: Makes sense (Score:2)
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What Saturn didn't have was cheap transparency, you had to do that yourself so most titles just used screen door. Transparent objects were cheap on Playstation and it made a big difference. It's too bad Sony, the company that co-invented the compact disc, can't make a laser unit worth a crap.
FFVII didn't allow you to rotate the view because it used pre-rendered, artist-retouched/drawn backgrounds and pre-rendered video clips with 3d characters overlaid over them.
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The Saturn was just as much a 3D machine as the PSX.
Just because the Saturn used quads as the underlying polygon (just like the 3DO) doesn't mean it's not 3D. It would be just as fair to say the PSX isn't 3D because it can't render NURBS surfaces directly.
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The Saturn had its 3D capabilities beefed up late in development, which is why they are a bit odd and tricky to get the best from. For example it has two GPUs, and the second one is designed just for generating the background image. It doesn't even render to RAM, it generates the background on the fly and mixes it with the framebuffer image produced by the first GPU.
If you are making a fully 3D game where you don't have a flat floor or simple sky background that second GPU is kinda useless. It can supply so
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The Saturn was designed as a 2D console, then fairly far along in development Sega realized they needed a 3D console. Rather than start over, they awkwardly tacked on 3D. It was a great 2D console that could do a mediocre job at 3D as well.
90's Sega was notorious for a lack of coordination between divisions. The Japanese branch developed the Saturn without telling the American branch about it. The American branch freaked out because they knew they needed to replace the Genesis, and reacted by creating the 3
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Sony forgot that for the PS2 when devs had to manage both the main processor and the Graphics Synthesizer that many devs hated. The PS3 then upped that even more adding 2 relatively weak main processors and the 7 Cell SPUs and the complicated management of them. It go so bad a lot of d
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And the removal of barrier-to-entry that cartridges was.
Carts had months of lead time, and you had a choice; risk ordering too many, and sit on unsold merch, or risk ordering too few, and miss a huge sales window for a hot game? Also, Nintendo limited you to a few games a year.
With the PS, you could put something out, and if it was a surprise hit, you could press a whole new series of discs over a weekend, and be in stores days later. And if it didn't, you could just move on to the next game.
Re: Remember the GameCube... (Score:1)
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I can still remember how SEGA had to lick Nintendo's boots and plea again and again so they would release the BBA adapter that would allow Phantasy Star Online to be released on Gamecube.
And like everything network-related, Nintendo botched the execution and the BBA became a major way to run homebrew software on the GC.
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And like everything network-related, Nintendo botched the execution and the BBA became a major way to run homebrew software on the GC.
Nintendo didn't botch the execution, Sega did. The PSO team created their own encryption for the network connection, and it was very easily hacked. The game would download a code update from Sega's server when you connected. Downloading code off the internet with poor homemade encryption was a very bad design that was very easily hackable.
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Nintendo had a reputation of being difficult to work with on the GameCube. All the information about how the console and the debug console worked was proprietary.
This isn't about the technical side of it, it's about working with Sony's PlayStation group on the visibility/promotion of games on the PlayStation.
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Having written the graphics engine for several AAA titles it was the best console of the bunch at the time. It's still my favorite console CPU of all time. The eight slot status register is pure gold.
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It's hard to knock Metrowerks back then. All C++ compilers sucked at the time. At the time Visual Studio was notorious for getting the scope of local variables wrong if you used them in a loop, and STL was anything but standard then.
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Sony's PlayStation group', really? are you shilling for them or something?
What do you mean "shilling for them"? You're suggesting this exhorbitant $25k advertising fee and their strange promotion system for developer submissions is handled by some other group?
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No, you just talk like a Sony marketing drone.
Because of the term "PlayStation group"?
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Aside from the fact that we're not talking about how difficult hardware is to technically work with, Gamecube didn't have a reputation of being hard. Rather Xbox had a reputation that it was easy to work with. The industry *norm* at the time was hard undocumented nightmares that kept developers awake at night, and that was Microsoft's main point of advertisement. You're talking about a Gamecube at the time the PS3 Cell architecture was out. That was an absolutely nightmare.
Though Nintendo was always a bit o
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Insane amount that Sony charges for promotion (Score:4, Funny)
I can't believe they think that $25k is a fair amount to charge a struggling developer to get exposure on their store. Just extortionate, and we shouldn't stand for-
Hmm, what was that? How much does Kotaku charge [i.redd.it] for advertising on its own platform, which doesn't even sell games?
They want free advertising? (Score:1)
I don't get the complaint here, not every game can always be promoted or in the deals section
Not surprised (Score:1)
Gives a fuck? (Score:2)
When did yes become no in the English langue?
I could care less (no you couldn't)
Gives a fuck (no they couldn't)
When did it become acceptable to an entire word from a sentence and think it has the same meaning?
Re: Gives a fuck? (Score:1)
When did yes become no in the English language?
Probably shortly after anime became popular.
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You're post literally gave me cancer.
I made an exclusive for MS just because of that. (Score:2)