Activision’s Kotick: ‘We May Not Make Games For The PS3 Next Year’
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This is a risky situation for Sony and they've already lost some of their classic Playstation-only games that would have actually forced people into buying a PS3. The biggest one is Final Fantasy, with the next one being released on Xbox as well as PS3, I saw little reason to even consider the PS3 when I went to buy a console and with games like Mass Effect and Halo as Xbox/PC only, the choice was easier.
PS3's graphics and processors seem superior if you look at current games, but we all know it is difficult to program for. I think we have seen the Xbox's incline, and will start to see 360 sales falter just a bit as it tops out. When this happens PS3 will begin getting more titles and more exclusives due to it's increased graphics and processing power benefits (Kind of like the PS2).
If you want a good example of this, compare the graphics of inFamous to Prototype. These are very similar games, but inFamous is exclusive to the PS3. To me it looks much better.
Sony's attitude toward developers, as reflected in the quality of their tools, seems to border on contempt. With the PS2, it was well worth the effort because of the huge number of units. With the PS3, it isn't quite as clear-cut.
I have to admit, that despite better technical specs, the user-experience with Xbox Live is just so much better that for any game I care for with a online-component, the Xbox 360 version gets the sale every single time.
As it is, I got the PS3 for near-free and hence have little emotional attachment to it, and these days have it around mostly as a bluray player.
I guess to make this comment relevant to hacker news and whoever does startups here: User-experience trumps technical merit. I don't care one way or the other if you wrote it in 100% purely in Haskell or some hacked up PHP. I want something which works for me.
Might not be a very cool message with the tech crowd, but as a consumer that's how I think. Heck I even ditched a technically superior Windows Mobile phone for an iPhone 3G and dammit if I will be going back.
PS: The largest gap IMO was needing to buy recharable battery's for the other systems. That really bothered me for some reason.
Programming for the PS3 is no easy task given the strange design of the cell processor and short comings of Sony's SDKs and frameworks. Given this, I feel that most developers/publishers are less apt to take risks with PS3. This leads to less games, and more games that are mainly ports from the 360. To add insult to injury most of these ports (and DLC) come later and they also tend to have a lot more bugs.
In defense of PS3, the other consoles aren't perfect either (360's were breaking left and right, and not having a hard drive by default was a big mistake game wise; Wii's software library is mostly shovel ware for 5 year olds); but imo the PS3's shortcomings are still the worst
EDIT: if PS3's new motion controller is as good in real life as it was at E3, it may change things.
Isn't the Xbox 360 processor based on the Cell design?
Someone can correct me, but to me the main difference between the 360's cpu and PS3's cpu, besides the number of cores, is that the 360's cpu cores are more general purpose while not all of the Cell's cores are equal... The Cell has one main core (PPE) and 8 Synergistic Processor Elements (SPEs). These SPEs are not as powerful as a normal core (and I think one of them is reserved for the OS), and (I think) they're main purpose is solely for graphics (well mainly good at dealing with floating point nums). If I remember correctly, the 360 has three general purpose, equally powerful cores (PPEs) in its version of the IBM cpu.
I can imagine someone from IBM probably selling a Sony exec on how the Cell processor can save money by having Cell do both general processing and handling all the video rendering without a separate GPU... which we all know didn't quite work as well as Sony had hoped, since PS3's had an NVidia chip plopped in last min (this probably explains why programming for a PS3 really sucks since Sony wasn't planning on having a separate GPU)
PS3 has:
Cell@3.2Ghz, yada yada
RSX 550 MHz, 300+ million transistors, ~200 GFLOPs
I mentioned that. The problem is PS3 wasn't meant to have a graphics card. The Cell was envisioned to do everything from the start. Years of planning went by before something inexplicably changed (maybe what they saw in real life didn't match what IBM promised?). The graphics card was added in at the last minute (which essentially resulted in a quick hack for release) or Sony's SDK/frameworks would have made it easier to use everything.
In Sony's defense, MS and Nintendo had some planning snafus too. Wii has that weird system for OS updates / new features and 360 will always be associated with red rings.