A few people are up in arms over a comment made by Sony’s Kaz Hirai to the effect that Sony deliberately made the PlayStation 3 a difficult console to develop for:
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?
I think it does make sense from a certain angle: If game quality improves throughout the lifetime of a console, owners are more likely to keep buying more games rather than getting the latest new console from competitor X.
The counter-argument would be that developers are usually able to improve quality over time even with easy-to-use development tools.
Certainly, it is a strategy that works best if you start from a position of absolute strength – which Sony to their own surprise didn’t this time around.
I can’t believe this. This is the exact same logic by which they cut retrocompatibility. Do business the Sony way: cut PS2 games so people will be forced to buy PS3 ones. It just shows their arrogance. They were convinced they could spare a few years of developers toiling around a difficult console, thinking their games library would grow in quality over time. This would only hold if they had dominated the market though, and now the competition has come out and taken it, as you say. Serves them right I say.
Reminds me of a restaurant near where I live. They served fancy meals and high-end cuisine, but they also had a line of nice pizzas for a very reasonable price, mainly to fill in for dead week evenings and lunch. People started going to the restaurant mainly for the pizza. But the boss didn’t want the “pizza clientele”, so they took the pizza away to force people to order fine cuisine instead. People stopped going and now it’s closed. I feel every time an announcement from Sony comes up, I get a glimpse into the kitchen and see the stashes of PSPepperoni tucked away behind the glistening glitz of unwanted fine cuisine.
Sounds like horseshit to me. No sensible hardware manufacturer that wants to attract third party developers =purposefully= makes their hardware difficult to develop for. PS3 is difficult to develop for, as a result of a combination of a number of factors, including a) a complex multi-processor architecture that is actually not all that well designed, since the secondary processors have minimal local memory, and therefore their ability to contribute to the processing pipeline is severely limited, b) a developer support operation that is not as well managed or supported as that of some other hardware manufacturers, for reasons I can speculate at but do not know; and c) you know, basic corporate arrogance.
It’s unquestionably true that developers working later in a hardware cycle wring capabilities out of the hardware that you don’t see earlier in the cycle, but Hirai’s comments have all the signs of an ex post facto rationale, an attempt to use a handful of actual facts to spin an argument that basically holds no water.
Do you design a fork to be very hard to keep in your hand and manoeuver, so you’ll only be able to eat properly in 2 month ? it was a flaw of sony, and microsoft saw it… i think Hirai’s comment is (only) about supporting sony product & politics. but you know, i’m sure he knows himself he’s wrong.
I agree with stephen. Sounded like a cover up to me. I think the reason why they didnt create ps3 an ‘easy to program for’ console was because to get capital gains over the research and implementation for bluray. I remember the days when minidisc was a big loss to sony when mp3 players suddenly appears on the market. So probably this time they trying to win it back with ps3 over bluray. Obviously this is all an assumption but i believes this is true in some level. And its probably one of the reason we havent see any recent price drops in ps3 too. Sometime company’s strategy to break even can be cruel to others, like in IBM australia; they stopped giving their employees coffee and biscuits due to global recession when they still making billions.