Mike, trying to have a conversation with you is like talking with a politician, saying it in the worst of the meanings. In your last two posts you give us pearls of programing knowledge as the following:
"Good developers like Crytek shouldn't run into too many problems." Implying that the guys at ID, Valve or Epic aren't good developers.
"Tim is a developer for Epic Games, which has some exclusive deals with Microsoft" Ad Hominem attacks. If you can kill the messenger, you don't have to give a reason why what he said isn't true, people are going to look at the finger instead to what the finger is pointing at.
"I think their game engine runs quite nicely on the PS3 nowadays, but in the past they got sued for lack of effort." Are you serious? Sued for lack of effort? Come on.
"They did state they don't want to enhance their game engine too much to take advantage of the Cell's SPEs in the past. But I think in course of time with others putting more effort into developing for the PS3 architecture they can't afford to stay behind too much (or suffer from looking incompetent or uncommited to a major gaming platform a lot of people prefer)." So now it's not that it is easy to develop for, but that they don't want to look bad compared to first and second party offerings, so they throw time and money to improve their engine. The problem is that you don't have infinite resources to do your work, only first and in a lesser way second party studios have the extra time and money Sony is willing to give to do technological demos. Maybe Sony losses money with the games, but in the eyes of the consumers they can show this games and put pressure in the third party studios with this "they don't know how to develop/they are lazy" nonsense. I'm not saying Sony losses money with their studios, but third party studios are much more risk averse, because they live and die with the profits of their games, Sony can exchange profits for brand image.
"The PS3 isn't hard to develop for at all, but using Microsoft recommended high level inefficient development approaches can result into significant porting issues" So we now know the problem. It's not that programming for the PS3 is a hard, time consuming duty, but that Microsoft "imposes" inefficient development approaches. The problem is that nowadays what you call inefficient development approaches are what the studios call economically efficient. We have seen a lot of studios die because the development budgets have sky rocketed, and if you have one of your games bomb, you could be finished. This is the problem of the PS3, developing for it is complex and time consuming -> very costly.
"Innovative blah blah rhetoric nonsense blah blah software from scratch." Nothing to do with the conversation.
"Developing from scratch is nowadays harder because many companies have invested many years or even decades into developing their legacy game engines and middleware. Developing from scratch the PS3 isn't much harder to develop for for competent programmers (there are endless quotes from low-level developers on this subject)." As far as looking for a neutral opinion, I'm always going to have more "faith" in a third party developer than a first or second party. You always throw ad hominem attacks to third parties, but you don't have problems quoting first and second party. Ah, you keep on throwing shit to all the developers who say PS3 is a bitch to program for.
"Creating game engines and middleware on modern consoles nowadays isn't a one man show like you could still write for simpler embedded or PSN games. There are too many aspects to topnotch modern gaming engines, it would take far too long for a single programmer to redevelop from scratch." Now I'm going to do something you specially like to do: Throw one or two counterexamples, as if the opinion of a single studio is more relevant than the immense majority. 3DBoy (world of goo) and Jonathan Blow (Braid) don't think that you couldn't do all by yourself.
The problem with you is that you talk as a politician. There is always people who is going to accept your message, but in forums it's a very annoying way to spread the way you see the things, because we have too much politics shit in our real lives.
