Sony cuts costs of PS3 development

[Procrastinato]

twesterm said:

Procrastinato said:
Think of it this way -- 40 devkits before this announcement cost $400K. Now they cost $100K. Some teams use closer to 80 devkits, some use more like 10-20. PSN titles probably get by with less than 10, for the most part.

Pretty cool for everybody.

 

Keep in mind there's a vast difference between a dev kit and a test kit, especially in price.  The only people that need dev kits are the actual programmers, everyone else (production, design, art, testing) only needs a test kit.  Test kits still cost a truckload of money, just not as much as a devkit.

Now the differences between a dev kit and test kit other than size (in the PS3's case at least), I forget.  I believe PS3 devkits have more memory and can also run the various debugging software while the test kit don't have the extra memory and don't run the extra debugging software but still run games from the hard drive or burned disc.  I could be wrong on that one, it's been a while since I cared.  >_>

Heh.  Maybe in your studio, that's true. =)

Besides, lots of studios have more than 40 engineers, and lots of studios need 2 devkits for most of those engineers (multiplayer testing).  It varies widely, but trust me when I say I know of studios that have over 160 devkits, all platforms inclusive, and test kits as well.