MikeB on 03 April 2009
@ Gilgamesh
Looks like all other devs that complained about the PS3 was just lazy.
I think the crucial factors with regard to the PS3 being hard or easy to work with has to do mostly with 2 factors.
1) State of the used game engine (can be 3rd party middleware) - Usage of Microsoft technology often makes it hard to port games to rival systems (I know devs who had hard times doing this, but with a lot of extra work achieved much more efficient results). Microsoft seem to try to make using their technology as easy as possible, but not using the most performance efficient approaches while going against the portable nature of the software.
Also the PS3 has 8 processors and thus requires advanced modern multi-threading game engines to take well advantage of.
2) Developer competence - Assuming the game company isn't entirely dependent on the state of 3rd party middleware, the PS3 requires some extra care. The Cell SPUs are excellent to help and take workload off the GPU and PPE, in addition to adding a lot of performance they are important to make everything run optimal. However programming for the SPUs requires some basic programming competence, knowledge about how things work under the hood, being able to do without some non-crucial conviences, but with the benefit of extreme performance potential.
