Japans PS3 Nightmare

[rocketpig]

auroragb said:

Taz42 said:

In response to auroragb, I think Sony's problems with tools and SDKs have a lot to do with their development being spread out all over the world and lack of overall coordination.

For example, if SCEE or SCEA needs some low level OS changes done in order to fix the debugger, they need to ask SCEI nicely and hope they will do it. Sometimes SCEI will do it and sometimes they will not and blame security issues. (in my experience, SCE priortizes security in development kits far higher than actually being able to develop) I'm sure they're making the right call sometimes, but it seems to me they are shooting themselves in the foot a lot.

I hear that this summer there will be a tools update that will finally make SPU (you know, those 6 micro CPUs that is supposed to deliver all that supercomputer performance) debugging not suck. That will be super if it is true, but still it is almost 2 years late.

You wonder why PS3 titles get delayed?

This is the exact thing that sony needs to get rid of.  The bureaucracy will kill developer relationship faster than anything.  Chief developers from the top tier publishers need direct access to system architect in sony that can make system wide architectural decisions and get them done.  going thru SCEA/SCEE is fine for the smaller developers, but sony needs to do this to hold on to exclusives and build confidence that publishers can succeed with PS3 titles...

I think it comes down to this:

Sony is a very poorly run company. It's run as if it is 15 small, separate entities that don't listen to one another. Imagine it as a huge household with 1 parent and 15 kids trying to run a business. The parent tries to reel in the kids constantly, mostly to no avail. One child may be successful, most others may not. These divisions (children) rotate between success and failure regularly but never achieve a unified vision.

This has been a complaint against Sony for the past 10 to 15 years. It's gotten so bad at times that they've released hardware that came with completely disfunctional bundled software (a Walkman in the UK a few years back) because the divisions didn't agree on a solution for the product. There was no clear leader in the project, leading to confusion, FUD, and multiple theories about how to create a product for a market. That's inexcusable.

I feel that this finally seeped into the Playstation model. It seems to me at times that SCE was forced into Blu-Ray because Sony wanted to push this format, not realizing the potentially disastrous results this could have on the Playstation brand. The same could be applied to Cell, but I'm not sure who started that project in Sony. It could have been SCE itself.

In short, it's been widely known that Sony needs a major restructure for years. I've been reading business reports regarding this very subject for nearly a decade now.