More interesting Sony testimonials from the official PlayStation Blog. This time Dave Karraker, Sr. Director of Corporate Communications tackles PlayStation 3 development difficulties and admits Xbox Live superiority to PlayStation Network, just likeMicrosoft claimed yesterday.
According to Karraker, manpower required per feature is the same for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, however PS3 offers more features than Xbox 360 and hence require more time to support those extra features. Interestingly, Karraker stated that development for Wii and PS2 require less man hours, but he stressed that the Xbox360/PS3 development cycle is the current industry standard.
The post goes on:
"Now, it's not without challenges:
1) SPUs are not 'normal' processors like the PPU. There is a trade-off between performance and versatility. A Ferrari is not the best car for a visit to Home Depot…
2) If you are porting:
If your game starts on Xbox 360 you will have to re-engineer aspects of the game to run properly on PS3. This means additional effort. Some developers have been complaining about this but I don't believe we can solve that. Xbox 360 is a different machine with good, but lower powered hardware in a different architecture. Developers have to view them as two different machines not as a common platform.
3) If your game has heavy online use:
XBL provides more and better standard libraries for online gaming to developers. For the same features on PS3, developers have to do some extra work. We're catching up, but there is a difference."
On the other side, when contacted, Xbox's Director of Games Platform Strategy Andre Vrignaud declined to give a detailed response but he noted that:
"Sony is facing the fact the Xbox 360 (thanks to being available a year earlier) is the default development platform for almost every game studio and publisher in the industry. It's been built into the tool chain and processes, and primary development is happening on the Xbox 360 for almost every game you can find.
There's a reason why the Xbox 360 version is almost always the version shown to press and analysts for new titles - often, the PS3 version isn't even started yet, or is well behind in development."
