Insomniac's Brian Hastings speaks out on the PS3

[drago]

kars said: It is not so easy as you think. PCs have some advantages that play a big role in this: All PCs are more or less universal. Their processors and even their basic architectures are structured in a way to make programing rather easy. Everything goes through standard libraries to hide the plattform from, the software. The more complicated the platform, the higher your costs, because the costs of a plattform always depend on ther number fo bugs you have to find and fix. In this case both plattforms have disadvantages, which result inh higher costs. Especially the SPUs of the cell are very selective. If you want to make a generique plattform you have to limit their power considerably. While the Xbox isn't very friendly either its basic architecture is much simpler and easier to hide. This raises the reuseability of code and makes the development cheaper. So if you want more power and abilities you have to be ready to pay a higher price. And on these platforms the costs raise considerably. In fact if you would ask this way, most developers would probably ask: "Why shouldn't we write for PCs and drop these consoles with their complicated hardware?". It would probavly be a better and cheaper approach. Every additional feature raises the costs considerably, because you have to test everything at least two times (one with the feature on, the other with the feature turned off). Do you really think that the customers would be ready to pay the higher price?

Well that kind of argument already works vs the PS3 in favor of the XBox 360 which should be very close to PC architecture. And those incarnations of PS3's would of course have the same architecture, so even it is not universal it is the same. Much like the Wii is basically a upgraded GC you could think of the Standard Def Unit as a downgraded PS3. Much of the conversion of the games could probably be automated and after a little finetuning you would be ready to sell your games to this additional low-end PS3 userbase, too. They sure could produce those more cost efficiently, too. For example, I dont know how high their yieldrates are, but normally they might have to throw some of their Cells and GPUs away, because they are not good enough, though they might do just fine for the downgraded units, etc. So the development costs would increase a little, but the potential sales also. Just think of it as a really low-cost port and as the the trend for multiplatforming these days implies, the underlying engines have become be more easily adjustable, too, so it should not be that much of a problem.