PS3 is Not More Powerful than Xbox 360, says game Dev!

[billsalias]

Two things many people seem to forget in these threads:

First, developers need to make money to stay in business and major changes in how you develop software is a significant cost. Yes the PS3 has potential to do some amazing things with it's architecture but it requires training and effort to tap it that no other systems do. Now if the PS3 had been released with an SDK that hid a lot of the complexity and allowed developers to tap this power without having to significantly change how they work then the PS3 would have been a undeniable technical success. But it was not so developers are left with the difficult choice of investing to get up to speed on a new way of doing things or not leverage that power in an optimal way.

Second, even if you want to invest in becoming a "real" PS3 developer finding engineers that can handle the concepts involved in developing for this architecture is difficult, hell it is hard finding engineers that are decent at multi threading. I have worked in software development for 20 years building multi tiered client server applications on parallel architectures. The hardest part of my job has been finding people that understand the concepts involved well enough do the work at an acceptable level. This is not just a matter of going to amazon and buying a book on parallel processing and spending a week playing around with it, there are some difficult concepts involved that are just beyond most peoples grasp without significant education. Even then a lot of people will just never be able to think in the way required to be good at this sort of thing.

If you combine these factors with how the market share breaks down it is not a good business decision for anyone but a first party developer to become good at PS3 development. Just learn enough to get performance to match the 360 version.

So my point of all this is don't blame the developers for not investing in learning the PS3, blame Sony for making them chose between staying in business and taking advantage of the potential of PS3.