

Activision’s Kotick: ‘We May Not Make Games For The PS3 Next Year’ - newsio
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-activisions-kotick-we-may-not-make-games-for-the-ps3-next-year-

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electromagnetic
This is potentially dangerous stuff. If Activision leads the way in not
producing PS3 games and sees a profit boost, then there's huge risks for Sony
that other games companies like EA will also stop publishing games to the PS3.

This is a risky situation for Sony and they've already lost some of their
classic Playstation-only games that would have actually forced people into
buying a PS3. The biggest one is Final Fantasy, with the next one being
released on Xbox as well as PS3, I saw little reason to even consider the PS3
when I went to buy a console and with games like Mass Effect and Halo as
Xbox/PC only, the choice was easier.

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oomkiller
All bark no bite as far as I'm concerned. Activision is just trying to get
Sony to drop the price by threatening to pull games. This doesn't really make
any sense, because Activision doesn't really produce many (if any?) PS3
exclusives, so making a game for 360 and not making it for PS3 would be crazy,
since it doesn't require as much work to port a game as it does to write it
from scratch.

PS3's graphics and processors seem superior if you look at current games, but
we all know it is difficult to program for. I think we have seen the Xbox's
incline, and will start to see 360 sales falter just a bit as it tops out.
When this happens PS3 will begin getting more titles and more exclusives due
to it's increased graphics and processing power benefits (Kind of like the
PS2).

If you want a good example of this, compare the graphics of inFamous to
Prototype. These are very similar games, but inFamous is exclusive to the PS3.
To me it looks much better.

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nazgulnarsil
this is unmitigated bullshit. if activision paid 1/2 a billion in royalties to
sony that mean their ps3 games raked in hundreds of millions in profit. you
think Activisions shareholders would allow them to stop developing for the
PS3? The CEO is just kicking the anthill that is tech news.

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csbrooks
It is a fact that the PS3 is a lot more painful to develop for, than 360 or
Wii. Maybe his goal is to get Sony to come out with some better developer
tools. Or just stuff that works right, and makes sense.

Sony's attitude toward developers, as reflected in the quality of their tools,
seems to border on contempt. With the PS2, it was well worth the effort
because of the huge number of units. With the PS3, it isn't quite as clear-
cut.

~~~
chaostheory
not to mention a large portion of PS3 users are older people who buy it as a
bluray player with extras rather than a video game system that can play bluray

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trezor
I have both a PS3 and a Xbox 360 and hence have no real loyalty one way or the
other.

I have to admit, that despite better technical specs, the user-experience with
Xbox Live is just so much better that for any game I care for with a online-
component, the Xbox 360 version gets the sale every single time.

As it is, I got the PS3 for near-free and hence have little emotional
attachment to it, and these days have it around mostly as a bluray player.

I guess to make this comment relevant to hacker news and whoever does startups
here: User-experience trumps technical merit. I don't care one way or the
other if you wrote it in 100% purely in Haskell or some hacked up PHP. I want
something which works for me.

Might not be a very cool message with the tech crowd, but as a consumer that's
how I think. Heck I even ditched a technically superior Windows Mobile phone
for an iPhone 3G and dammit if I will be going back.

~~~
Retric
Between the PS3, Wii, or Xbox 360 I prefer the PS3. Granted, FPS on the Xbox
suck when compared to FPS on a PC; so I don't really play any multiplier games
on it. Basically, I feel console gaming is mostly about the arcade feel and
the PS3 wins that.

PS: The largest gap IMO was needing to buy recharable battery's for the other
systems. That really bothered me for some reason.

~~~
chaostheory
The main problems I have with the PS3 are 1) the size & and the content of its
software library 2) the QA level of the games

Programming for the PS3 is no easy task given the strange design of the cell
processor and short comings of Sony's SDKs and frameworks. Given this, I feel
that most developers/publishers are less apt to take risks with PS3. This
leads to less games, and more games that are mainly ports from the 360. To add
insult to injury most of these ports (and DLC) come later and they also tend
to have a lot more bugs.

In defense of PS3, the other consoles aren't perfect either (360's were
breaking left and right, and not having a hard drive by default was a big
mistake game wise; Wii's software library is mostly shovel ware for 5 year
olds); but imo the PS3's shortcomings are still the worst

EDIT: if PS3's new motion controller is as good in real life as it was at E3,
it may change things.

~~~
newsio
"Programming for the PS3 is no easy task given the strange design of the cell
processor and short comings of Sony's SDKs and frameworks."

Isn't the Xbox 360 processor based on the Cell design?

~~~
chaostheory
yeah all of the cpu's for this gen of consoles are from IBM including the Wii

Someone can correct me, but to me the main difference between the 360's cpu
and PS3's cpu, besides the number of cores, is that the 360's cpu cores are
more general purpose while not all of the Cell's cores are equal... The Cell
has one main core (PPE) and 8 Synergistic Processor Elements (SPEs). These
SPEs are not as powerful as a normal core (and I think one of them is reserved
for the OS), and (I think) they're main purpose is solely for graphics (well
mainly good at dealing with floating point nums). If I remember correctly, the
360 has three general purpose, equally powerful cores (PPEs) in its version of
the IBM cpu.

I can imagine someone from IBM probably selling a Sony exec on how the Cell
processor can save money by having Cell do both general processing and
handling all the video rendering without a separate GPU... which we all know
didn't quite work as well as Sony had hoped, since PS3's had an NVidia chip
plopped in last min (this probably explains why programming for a PS3 really
sucks since Sony wasn't planning on having a separate GPU)

~~~
Retric
The PS3 has a graphics card. SPE's can be used to preprocess some information
to increase graphics quality or to crunch numbers for AI code, or do any
number of things. The problem is you can either code for the lowest common
denominator between the systems and mostly ignore SPE's or build a game
focusing on the PS3.

PS3 has:

    
    
      Cell@3.2Ghz, yada yada
      RSX 550 MHz, 300+ million transistors, ~200 GFLOPs
    

PS: The RSX has a higher GFLOPs than the Cell but it's only really usefull for
specific graphics operations.

~~~
chaostheory
"The PS3 has a graphics card"

I mentioned that. The problem is PS3 wasn't meant to have a graphics card. The
Cell was envisioned to do everything from the start. Years of planning went by
before something inexplicably changed (maybe what they saw in real life didn't
match what IBM promised?). The graphics card was added in at the last minute
(which essentially resulted in a quick hack for release) or Sony's
SDK/frameworks would have made it easier to use everything.

In Sony's defense, MS and Nintendo had some planning snafus too. Wii has that
weird system for OS updates / new features and 360 will always be associated
with red rings.

