Do you prefer the generations that were competitive, or one-sided?

[curl-6]

Spindel said:

curl-6 said:

Better APIs did help makes things less painful as time went on, yes. The hardware itself though was just highly heterogenous/asymmetrical compared to 360 and later consoles, which meant it took more work to optimise games for.

There's a reason why Sony abandoned this approach going forwards and instead adopted a much simpler hardware setup for PS4 and PS5.

Sony made a point of declaring how PS4 was easier to develop games for, and developers echoed this, praising the system for its ease of use.

While we talk about the PS3 being difficult, wasn’t the PS2 also considered difficult?

Yeah, like PS3 (though not to the same extent) on PS2 you had to balance tasks in parallel between multiple different processing units.

Gamecube/Xbox/Dreamcast were more straightforward if I recall correctly.