That's a weird assertion for a console that sold 87M units, ranks #8 in the all-time top-selling consoles list, and marginally outsold Xbox360 which is compared against in TFA.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_cons...
> The PS3 failed developers because it was an excessively heterogenous computer; and low level heterogeneous compute resists composability.
Maybe in 15 years someone crazy enough will be delving in and building games that fully utilize every last aspect of the hardware. Like this person does on the N64: https://youtube.com/@kazen64?si=bOSdww58RNlpKCNp
Yes, especially exclusives like Uncharted, Demon Souls, Heavy Rain, Ni No Kuni, Metal Gear solid 4. They were definitely developed for Xbox, that version was kept secret and only the PS3 version was published due to Sony bribes.
I'd like to thank the above devs for going through the pain of developing those titles that entertained me back then...
There were some gems. I owned a PS3 and had tons of fun. Nothing in this discussion speaks directly to the entertainment value of good Sony exclusives or cross-console ports. Many people don’t care one ounce about a minor performance deficit. Deep breath.
Yeah usually only first party studios have the time, money, and access for that (Naughty Dog being a prime example thereof in the Sony universe).
"a game available for both Xbox and PS3."
The "both" part means they aren't talking about exclusives.
Funnily enough the opposite of this did actually happen at least once: https://archive.org/details/gears-of-war-3-ps3
Is cell really so different from computer shaders with something like Vulkan? I feel if a performance-competitive cell were made today, it might not receive so much hate, as people today are more prepared for its flavour of programming. Nowadays we have 8 to 16 cores, more on P/E setups, vastly more on workstation/server setups, and we have gpu’s and low level gpu APIs. Cell came out in a time when dual core was the norm and engines still did multi threading by having a graphics thread and a logic thread.
Comparing the SPEs to compute shaders is reasonable but ignores what they were for. Compute shaders are almost exclusively used for graphics in games. Sony was asking people to implement gameplay code on them.
The idea the PS3 was designed around did not match the reality of games. They were difficult to work with, and taking full advantage of the SPEs was very challenging. Games are still very serial programs. The vast majority of the CPU work can't be moved to the SPUs like it was dreamed.
Very often games were left with a few trivially parallel numerical bits of code on the SPEs, but stuck with the anemic PPE core for everything else.
So while PS3 was not ultimately a commercial success, it was clearly disliked by developers and the launch was certainly a disaster. I think you could argue the PS3 was a failure in many regards, and a success in some other regards. Credit to Sony, they definitely persevered through a tough launch and made it out to the other end. Nintendo wasn't able to pull off the same for the Wii U, even though it also did have some good exclusive games in the library.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20161104003151/http://www.pcworl...
Lots of PS2.
Before that, only PS1's and PS2's were around.
(Belgium)
Going from such market dominance to second place is not good. Not being able to improve upon your position as the industry leader is not good. Failure might be strong, but I certainly wouldn't be happy if I was an exec at Sony at the time.
> The PS3 failed developers because it was an excessively heterogenous computer; [...]
Here is a good example: The PS3 sold only slightly more than half as many units as its predecessor, the PS2, did. Most businesses would, in fact, consider it a failure if their 3rd generation product sold much more poorly than the second generation. Sony's rapid move away from the PS3/Cell architecture gives you a pretty good reason to believe they considered it a failure too.
This does imply an architectural misstep, and one of IBM's last.
AMD vanquished IBM from the next generation of consoles.