Carmack believes development toolkits on the Xbox 360 are easier than the PS3. He's a very smart guy and loves to optimize for a given platform. He says:
"We’ve got our PlayStation 3 dev kits, and we’ve got our code compiling on it. I do intend to do a simultaneous release on it. But the honest truth is that Microsoft dev tools are so much better than Sony’s. We expect to keep in mind the issues of bringing this up on the PlayStation 3."
Can barriers like this really impact overall motivation to develop on the PS3 platform? In the end, money is money, right? If enough customers own a PlayStation 3 the additional overhead to development is worthwhile to capture a larger audience. He does say:
"I think the decision to use an asymmetric CPU by Sony was a wrong one. There are aspects that could make it a winning decision, but they’re not helpful to the developers. If they make the developers say that Sony is going to own the main marketplace, let’s make them develop toward this and build it this way, it would somewhat downplay the benefits of the Xbox 360 and play to the PlayStation 3’s strengths. I suspect they’re not going to overwhelmingly crush the marketplace this time, which wasn’t clear a year ago."
Does that mean Carmack is a Microsoft fanboy?
"I’ve been pulling for Microsoft, because I think they’ve done a better job for development support, and I think they have made somewhat smarter decisions on the platform. It’s not like the PlayStation 3 is a piece of junk or anything. I was not a fan of the PlayStation 2 and the way its architecture was set up. With the PlayStation 3, it’s not even that it’s ugly--they just took a design decision that wasn’t the best from a development standpoint."
Sure seems that way, but unlike a gamer, he's not a fan because of the great games or the need to own Microsoft products. He's a fan of the development setup which Microsoft has always proven to be good at accomplishing. We believe one reason Microsoft dominated the Operating System industry was by giving developers tools they need to get the job done early and often. Your product is only as good as the developers that code for it, this should be the primary focus for any new console.
Without games the console is just consuming space on your shelf. The PlayStation product has always been known to be a "difficult development environment," however this almost contradicts the amount of games the PlayStation 2 has released. Lesson? It's only hard until you figure it out. Therefor developers will spend a large amount of time, up front, learning the PlayStation 3 in's and out's but as time passes they'll learn the tricks of the trade and gain the ability to crank out a high quality game with less bitching.
So far the pattern for this behavior is all there: a launch set for the PlayStation 3 that is less than impressive. However, if developers are sitting in front of a screen, right now, learning how to code for the PS3 it is only going to be a matter of months before they start producing quality content. Maybe six to eight months... but the console will be around for years to come.
source: gameinformer
