I know your not trying to say Rare hasnt made anything great.

OHNOHEDIDNT.GIF

Wait until REAL games. Wait until THIS game. Wait until THAT game. WAIT WAIT WAIT. I don't wanna wait... But when the time comes it better be fuggin good and it better blow me away.

I think Sony has the wrong approach now - almost certainly.

I'm not sure what "types" of games they are trying to create - and maybe I won't understand until I see something completely mindblowing.

But this is a GAMES machine for heavens sake, not some distributed weather simulator device that  the planet relies on. Surely we have reached a stage in the industry where "ease of development" is more important than "absolute power, via banging your head against a wall"?

Look at Unreal Engine 3. Everyone loves it - why? Sure it has great tech, with some cool features - but its the EDITING tools - the ease of use - that really sells it. It means you can make better games in less time, with less money. And this is more important than ever.

By the time people get the "hang" of the PS3, MS will be ready to release the next Xbox. It will be EASIER to program (better libraries, higher level APIs, etc..), and will blow away the PS3 (at that stage of being "unlocked") technically.

...

As devices get more powerful, the importance of "ease of use" increases, and squeezing everything out of the device is less important. It was critically important with the PS1 generation, very important with the PS2 (although the PS2 never competed with the Xbox)... and not really important at all with this generation.

Look at the Wii - and how well it is doing. Even a monkey developer should be able to get several times the power of a Wii out of a PS3... and that's without even trying.

Sony are digging themselves a deeper hole - and have just developed a much bigger shovel.

Its good that the potential is there, obviously it would be better to have less limitations in the future, however, we are being asked to pay a high price for the PS3 now, on the promise that there might be justification later on. PS3 wont sell well without those killer games and PS3 wont be getting those games until it sells well. It is Sony's own arrogance that got them here, thinking the PS3 would sell without games. They have had the longest time with the system and could have had 1 or 2 games that just blew everything else away. But they didn't and now all their games are on the 360 as well... But, the 360 was a lot more powerful than the PS2 and it didnt matter. The fact is the potential for the PS3 will never be realized. Developers are past the point where they will spend $50M for an exclusive PS3 game that takes full advantage of the system. It is up to Sony to show that they can move the hardware and so far they have failed in that regard.

So.... Sony has delibrately locked the power? and when the next Xbox is launched, all Sony needs to do is launch a new firmware to compete?

You are absolutely right, no sane developer ever liked working on the PS2 either, that's why there were never any 3rd party titles for it, all I ever had to play were 1st party titles, oh wait, that was on my buddies gamecube ;)

It's phenomenal that the Cell has such great potential. The question is ... what dev will be the one to invest the time and money to unlock all of its potential? And, will it be worth it to them with the PS3 performing this badly?

There is a threshold of difficulty that some developers are just not willing to cross. Take the Saturn, for example. It has a twin Hitachi cpu for example that was quite difficult to program for. To my knowledge, the only company to have taken full advantage of both CPUs was Sega themselves. Most of the software simply did not take full advantage of the hardware. The story for the Saturn and the PS3 were uncannily similar (first 6 months). There was always the "just wait until developers figure out how to handle the dual cpu" and "sega just released a new dev kit to help developers take advantage of both CPUs" and so on. Sega didn't have the money to ride out the hardware storm and the games never came. Developers went elsewhere... Sony has a much larger prior install base and a rabid fan following so I'm sure they aren't going to fail in the long term as Sega did in the HW business but my point here is that Sony needs to get past the "difficult to develop for" stage before too many developers either go multi or give up altogether...

Its not stoping Ninja Theory Factor5 and Insomniacs.   Its already been proven worth it by Insomniacs.   

 Plenty developers are pushing the hardware, and plenty top devs like Kojima or SE have praised it as most powerfull this gen.

Wow put down the hateraid.

Many devs already get the PS3, Factor5 has already taped power that 360 can't do. The amonunt of progressive mesh Lair runs is beyond 360s capability, and they have said its only half the PS3s power.

and whats your point with unrealengine3 ? the engine runs on PS3 so any dev can lease/rent/get it and make PS3 games easy.