Our friends over at GamePro.com have written an interesting article on a topic I get asked about all the time — Is the PS3 harder to develop for than other systems? I gave them some feedback on this and the reporter, Blake Snow, does a nice job of presenting a well-rounded story. For this piece, I spoke to our PD group and asked them for input on this question and thought you might be interested in reading their full reply:
This is an interesting question and hidden within the question is an enormously complex subject! If the game starts life on PS3, then man-hours per feature or costs related to asset production are comparable with industry norms. For that, you can include Xbox 360 and high-end PC games, and exclude PS2 and Wii. However, since PS3’s Cell processor allows MORE features – better physics, more complex graphical processing, lighting or sound, etc. — there is inevitably going to be more cost in supporting those extra features. It’s not that PS3 is harder to write for, it’s just that you can do more with it.
Middleware tools like Havok and other specialist graphics tools are now customized to exploit Cell’s SPUs. These mean that developers don’t have to reinvent those particular wheels themselves. Also, PlayStation Edge does some very difficult and performance-critical aspects of the graphics pipeline on the SPUs: geometry processing, animation, compression – delivering performance unachievable on other systems. This is available for free to all developers from SCE. So, given that PS3 can draw more on screen, the assets required to fill that capacity go up, too. This can, but not always, require more people – however depending on the game, much of that extra content can be produced automatically – procedurally in software, not by hand. Compared to PS2, the SPUs are much easier to code for. In PS2 we had some custom chips called VU0 and VU1 which were powerful, but tricky to write for. The SPUs use a more standard programming language.
Now, it’s not without challenges:
1) SPUs are not ‘normal’ processors like the PPU. There is a trade-off between performance and versatility. A Ferrari is not the best car for a visit to Home Depot…
2) If you are porting:
If your game starts on Xbox 360 you will have to re-engineer aspects of the game to run properly on PS3. This means additional effort. Some developers have been complaining about this but I don’t believe we can solve that. Xbox 360 is a different machine with good, but lower powered hardware in a different architecture. Developers have to view them as two different machines not as a common platform.
3) If your game has heavy online use:
XBL provides more and better standard libraries for online gaming to developers. For the same features on PS3, developers have to do some extra work. We’re catching up, but there is a difference.
BTW: Glad you guys and gals are enjoying the new blog!
I don’t think the problem with PS3 is so much that it is too hard to develop for. I think, rather, it is that there aren’t enough people who has a PS3 to make a game profitable enough. There are so few PS3 users that most developers choose to go multiplatform just so they can make enough money to worth the cost. So, I think as more PS3 exclusives roll out and more people have PS3, there will be more exclusive games for it and hence more users, and hence more exclusives: a snowball effect.
Sony should buy Capcom :) I want Dead Rising on PS3!
[…] made by GamePro.com to Sony were answered by Sony’s Director of Corporate Communications, Dave Karraker, who responded that, yes, Cell is a […]
What is annoying about this article is the way the writer uses expressions such as “more cost”, “additional effort” and a sentence that starts “Developers have to…”.
Developers “have to” do whatever their project managers tell them to do and, likewise, project managers are given tight deadlines to meet. If delivering a sub-standard port to a platform with a tiny customer base is more profitable than spending extra time doing a more thorough job, then that is what those companies will continue to do.
I wonder whether Bethesda’s decision to create a superior port of Oblivion actually paid off in terms of revenue? Of course, this won’t have been helped by Electronics Boutique’s decision not to stock this game in the UK.
Sony has a clear choice: they can either help these 3rd party companies with the extra cost and effort, or they can sit back and watch their customers desert them for superior Xbox 360 versions of the most popular games.
At the moment, there is absolutely no incentive for 3rd party developers to improve this situation and every incentive for Sony to step in.
If Sony is truly serious about embracing user content, they need to release a similar development environment to XNA ( http://www.xna.com/ ) and make it super easy for people to share their games with the community. This would also allievate the need for offical PS3 releases. If you are unable to bring out an XNA competing product, release the specs/drivers so that developers can access the RSX graphics chip. More software for your console, will sell more consoles. Software sells hardware. Embrace the homebrew community. You’ll thank them in the long run.
Hello. I am a gamer and hope that the whole Video Game Industry continues to grow. Microsoft and Nintendo look to be doing well, but Sony isn’t. However, Sony is shaping up and in the future, it may be have the PS3 become just as strong in competition as that of the Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii. Yes, the PS3 is the most powerful, but what more it needs are more first party titles. Multiplatform games feel like something that is only hurting certain parts of the Video Game Industry. Although certain third party titles are important, including that of Half-Life 2, Unreal 2007, GTA IV, Army of Two, and many others, it would be a much better idea to stick with one of the companies as it would give more strength to that very company and help it evolve its system even more. If one of the three companies: Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft fails this generation, the Video Game Industry will only begin to fall apart, which is something that none of us would want. Also, I consider myself to begin working in the Video Game Industry, having a company of my own with its own systems and video games, which will be a hard journey. I am beginning to learn C++ and will strive to learn even more throughout the summer, working little by little, each day, which will only help my efforts grow more strong. I have already a bunch of different ideas for games that I would love to work with and for how the systems of my could work, but of course, I need more intelligence on knowing how to make those things happen and thus, I will need to work hard on learning everything I can from the hardware, to the software, and to the games themselves. A passion for creating things is what I have, so video games are one of them and if I can incorporate even more into my mind, there is a possibility that I will work with technology as well.
Go on topic of the article, I would like to ask a question. Do you think that it would be possible to have a game load up all of the data from itself in the beginning (like in GTA IV), so that when you are playing through the game later on, you won’t see anymore load times? If developers can find a way to do it like in GTA IV, then it would really remove all of that hard time with seeing the load times show up throughout different portions of the game. I’d rather see a game load up in the beginning and take some time as opposed to seeing it load in only a few seconds at many times found in the game. Summing up all of the load times at once is what I’d consider the solution and to have that occur in the beginning of the game like in GTA IV is what I’d call a solution to ever having to complain about the load times ever again once you have already begun to play the game. But of course, I’m sure that as you are playing an online game, it will take load times at different points, from when you get searching for a match, to playing a match, to when you stop playing it. However, it’s likely that as more time goes by and as developers know how to handle the PS3 more, it will be possible that the load times won’t be that of a problem as they had been in the first place.
As for whether I have a PS3 or not, I don’t own one yet. Currently, I have one of the 7th generation consoles and that is the Wii. I plan to possibly buy the 360 next year (if I have made the money for buying it by then) and even have my eyes set on buying the PS3 around 2-3 years later. I rent GameFly right now, my focus being on Gamecube, PS2, and possibly even Xbox games since I haven’t finished looking at many of the important titles of the 6th generation. My biggest intent is on renting all the good to perfect games of every genre within as many of the different systems available now and in the future to make sure that I learn all I can and am later able to make video games of my own that, in the end, will have covered all of the different video game genres that have come to exist, and at the same time, providing the most innovative and well presented experience ever found within all of those genres, so you see, I am very determined in being the best of the Video Game Industry. There are many interests of the different video game genres that are out there. I like variety and so, I plan to work upon most, if not all, of the video game genres that have come into existence.
Waiting for the price drops of both the 360 and PS3 is possibly the best solution for me to buy those two systems in the future and to learn all I can from them as much as that from any other video game system that I have come to own.
Development of the PS3 games will soon become easier when those newer first party titles come out. As a matter of fact, it may be that the third party titles have what it takes to save Sony in this next-gen console war, as they have done so in the previous generations that Sony has been found working in the Video Game Industry, that being both the 5th and 6th generations. Only this time, there will need to be certain third party titles exclusive to the PS3 or even come out first on the PS3 to ensure that the PS3 doesn’t fail.
One last thing that I want to say is that while the Xbox Live service is much better, the POP (Playstation Online Platform) service is being updated and as we leave more suggestions up for Sony on how to improve the online experience, it may be possible that, with the updating they give, the POP and Xbox Live will be matched at one point in time, but that does not ensure that the POP will turn out as the best online service in the end. Only time, money, and ideas as well as strategies will tell.
@Savage (#405): I’d really like to see what the long-term plan for any kind of homebrewn dev is on the PS3. The RSX is still encrypted on Linux so it’s just not there yet for any kind of home dev. Tragically, I completely missed that whole era on PS2 Linux too or I would have jumped on it as I’ve been wanting to do game development on a current console platform for literally decades now. I have to say though, I wasn’t really all that impressed with XNA, you’re talking about a managed layer for gaming (XNA) on top of a managed programming layer (C#/.NET) from what I understand (which if it’s anything like the PC version is also running managed DirectX libraries). I’d gladly program in C++ to get the performance increase, the gaming companies out there don’t code their games in C# that would be too slow for production games. I tried playing a few samples of games out there on the net that were written in XNA and they were slow (~20fps) on my system (3.2ghz dual core/2gb ram/2x 7800GT OC’s SLI). Granted that’s not as fast as the 360’s hardware, but it should be at least fast enough to play those games at a faster frame rate considering all my PC games including ones that are currently available on 360 run easily at 60fps (…which is a major reason I didn’t buy a 360 let alone the XBL membership fees and $99/yr XNA fees…).
@Seren (#377): Glad to see someone else here who follows the demo scene. I saw that Debris demo about a month ago and loved it (but that’s an automatic for anything from FR), I would drool heavily if a PS3 demo scene opened up. I’m not going to try to minimize the complexity of coding for the PS3, but I’ll definitely speculate that a good portion of the gaming companies that are complaining about the difficulty of programming for the PS3 have probably never coded anything close to the kind of optimization of all those 64k intros written entirely in ASM we know and love that still utilize intensive OpenGL functions (…and those guys don’t get paid they do it for fun!…).
@BitRunner: To be honest it alarms me more people don’t follow the demoscene, as I find it foreshadows what’s going to happen in the industry. Look at Starbreeze, I think the quality of the Riddick game was a surprise to the gaming community but probbably not to those who had followed their scene work. They foreshadowed the Doom 3 engine and beating Carmack to the punch is no mean feat.
You are right of course, in industry budget and time constraints (plus a genuine lack of truly talented programmers) means that level of optimisation is not even considered as viable in a dev cycle. Of course as more companies shift over to licensing as opposed to core development of engine and tools this will become less of an issue.
The biggest indication of where Sony is not taking the initiative in comparison to Microsoft with what is the grass roots of the industry can be observed by anybody atending Assembly this year. An XNA demo competition, of course there has been a 360 demo before but generating a scene around it will produce results in months only seen over years of games development. Probbably creating a robust set of OpenGL libraries as a BYPRODUCT!
Sony need to allow a scene to develop and for that they need to allow access to all the hardware and provide the tools to use it, not token and mostly useless gestures of Linux that struggles with the limited resources.
To be honest if senes spring up surrounding the 360 and PS3 you’ll get a more accurate view of comperable power between the two systems out of sceners than will come out of and Sony or Microsoft employee or any developer.
Step up Sony, access to hardware, tools, developer support, community encouragement and a robust online service. You’ve accepted you are being thrashed in online now accept you are being thrashed in these other areas and address it rather than release rediculous press statements to obfuscate the real issue.
Microsoft have ralised that with XNA they are opening the door to the kind of amateur creativity that has been lacking since the days of the C64 and Amiga. Many of those amateurs are now some of the industrys most respected figures, especially in my locality of the UK. Right now in his/her bedroom the next Peter Molyneux or Jeff Minter is possibly coding a simple bottom shooter for 360 – not PS3, and demoscene crews are sizing up to compete in producing a winning demo for 360 – not PS3. Doesn’t that bother you?
@Seren: I wholeheartedly agree with you on every point, and to your point it does bother me that non-commercial coders aren’t getting a chance to utilize the PS3 hardware, it seems to fall out of line with the whole “Game 3.0” concept if you ask me, but that’s kind of stretching the interpretation.
Like I said to Savage though in the same post, XNA is all managed code from what I understand (at least the dev environment I know is VS2005), which is for sure going to run slower than anything done in ASM or even C++. I’m sure the demo scene coders already do enough optimization to get a clean 60fps on the 360, at least as much as you can do in a managed environment, but they could get a bigger performance lift with lower-level code. I’m not trying to knock .NET development, it’s very useful for RAD and I use it every day for making small tools that I don’t want to spend the extra time developing, but I wouldn’t consider using it for intensive operations.
What I really don’t understand though is that the PS2 had a Linux dev kit with complete access to the hardware, albeit that you couldn’t run native PS2 games from Linux. I didn’t get a chance to have one myself (I didn’t even know about it until it was discontinued in the U.S. and now I can’t even find it on e-Bay or I’d snag one up), but it sounded like a dream come true. I have to wonder what kind of problems happened with that setup to cause Sony to not continue with the same methodology on the PS3’s Linux? It would make more sense to have the hypervisor disable the Blu-Ray access, and anything on USB that wasn’t a known peripheral device (i.e. keyboard/controller/headset only, no USB drives), rather than disable access to the RSX chip and the untapped SPU’s, then only allow Linux binaries to be run and not native PS3 binaries and also only allow the Linux partition to be mounted to avoid piracy of the commercial games, while still allowing access to the graphics hardware (it’s no contest that in case of homebrewn RSX > Blu-Ray). I could be way off-base here, but that sounds plausible at least in theory, I’m sure there’s lots of caveats to it though.
I’d really like to see Sony make a legit way to homebrew on the PS3 and even better a demo scene, plenty of us like me are itching to utilize the hardware to its fullest extent, and I’m hoping that we’ll get to see that happen eventually (fingers crossed).
who cares what it i paid 600 dollar for next gen gaming and im not getting it and yes im bashing till i get what i paid for. hope like others they fix it but i dont think it can be and if so at least make it were it plays ps2 games better there is a graphics problem smooth out the edges up a bit . for now the only next gen my ps3 doing is collecting next gen dust and so placed on ebay thank god for them. for as the 360 i have one. sorry sony but stronger or not its still better all the way around better graphics more games alot better net for online play and not hard to get on. AND THATS WHAT MATTERS NOT WHAT KIND OF CPU OR SPU IT HAS keep up with kind of work sony youll end up with sega and atari
The PS3 is not hard to develop for. I’ve compared the PlayStation Edge Software with the other middleware software(C, C++, etc.) There isn’t any difference. The PSE configures all the SPU from the beginning. I think the dev are trying to do it the old, well-known way thru C, and C++. the only way they will stop them from complaining is that Sony start offering classes for DEVELOPERS. This will help them discover the secret around the cell.
To another subject I was reading in the comment about the blu-ray drive. It may read at a slow rate but it read more data than a DVD drive. Blu-ray 2x(4.8gb per sec.) and DVD 24x(965mb up to 1g per sec.) lets do the math, blu-ray reads more at a slower spin.
Yeah I’m no programmer but I believe as the first comment says, that ports are messing things up. Games for PS3 need to be spectacular due to the fact that you pay a not so spectacular price for the machine.
Need developers to develop games for the PS3 then worry about porting the titles to other systems. Not the other way around.
You just don’t buy a pig make-up.
Too much money and little time to play games :P I can tell ya Sony Cell is hard, when it comes to mod/hacks it even harder.
Fox
My question for Deadmeat is:
The 1st generation of titles for the xb360 were nothing to write home about grahics wise. How come the likes of Motostorm looks better as a 1st gen title on the PS3 and even looks better then any 2nd or 3rd gen on the xb360 even with its increased power `over` the ps3?
I simply dont get it. Some of the 1st gen titles coming now for ps3 ” Lair ” “Heavenly Sword ” look much more next gen than anything on the xb360 in my opinion.
Is there a game on teh xb360 that rivals the visiuals for said games above on its 1st year of release? I dont think tbh.
Hmm, we are only human. Some skill are better than other. Motorstorm team knew what they were doing..
Your trying to match a PC with Mac, doesn’t work that way. It like playing DX10 game on DX9 video card, it will work, but dosen’t mean going to get everything game as to ofter.
Mostly games are build on basic Linux or MS, then port over to hardware going to use for, changes are made for bugs and ect..
Fox
Opps my PSP battery die :(
Madden 08 and NCAA 08 for XBOX 360 runs on 60 frames per second (fps) but only 30 fps for Playstation 3 what is up with that? :(
I’m also curious about why Madden and All-Pro football will only run at 30 fps? The forums seem to place the blame on Sony. Could you address this please?
Thanks
EA announced that Medal of Honor Airborne will be delay its release from October to November……. (Mean while PC and Xbox 360 gets in August) damn I am so pissed!! ;(
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[…] see such frequent and interesting updates. Through posts that include interesting revelations and thought provoking industry pieces, the blog is clearly a means for Sony to communicate directly with their audience. […]
[…] alert! Dave Karraker recently slapped a new post on the official PlayStation blog regarding developers’ complaints that the PS3 is hard to develop for. His stance on the issue […]