For the larger part of this generation Sony have dominated most third-party studios when it comes to graphical prowess. One needs to only look at Sony’s past and upcoming games. Games like Killzone 2 and The Last of Us clearly dominate the majority of third-party games in their respective genres. However with the next generation of consoles approaching this could all change.
Biggest strength in previous gens (third party support) ultimately became their biggest weakness. As Third Parties are only as loyal as the $. Third Parties largely defined the PS brand, now that multiplatform releases are much more commonplace Sony has been unable to differentiate themselves in a meaningful way from their two biggest competitors.
M$ gets preferential 3rd Party support, Nintendo's first party titles sell 3x as much as Sony's. This coming gen Sony will have their hands full.
Will see how they react to this changing landscape. They've never came into a new gen of gaming as the previous gen loser. Should be interesting.
good read
Good article. Being more dev friendly is only going to benifit sony in the long run because with better third party support the consumer will be the clear winner with a larger library of quality games.
But in response to the article itself. I don't think all the devs that had problems with the ps3 architecture are lazy, some are and definetly some have clearly pandered to ms over working a little harder to make their ps ports work properly *cough*bethesda*cough*. Some companies probably just dont have the resources to use the ps3 to its full potential, but there are devs who can and have so we know its possible. I'm just glad sony is making the next console as develper friendly as possible so devs wont have that excuse anymore.
also next gen engines are helping to expedite the development process so games should eventually be cheaper faster and easier to produce. Take a look at Unreal 4 enginee on youtube, it looks amazing.
Thx Guys I really try to approach these articles from a balanced point of view. And provide substance as to why I think the way I think. Hopefully I got my point across in a fair way
Perhaps a tad sporadic in it's focus but nevertheless thought provoking, and in my opinion 'thereabouts' in terms of accuracy.
I would have to disagree with the idea that the reason third parties have not emulated first party games is entirely down to the complexity of the PS3 hardware. I can see that a viable argument for the first three to four years, but there has to come a time when developers fully understand why their games are not matching first party in technical achievement.
So what could that missing point be? I think it's actually quite simple. There are two reasons why I believe developers have opted for the poor port option rather than focusing on emulating Sony's own studios:
1/ One glance at the size of Sony exclusives gives you a direct insight into the problem facing third party developers. Increasing the discs costs more and makes it difficult to create a coherent package without necessitating a constant back and forth disc swap; thus linearity is inevitable in the majority of titles or repeated textures to allow for bigger environments.
Yes, Uncharted 1/2/3 are linear in nature, but the diversity in textures and environments is clear to see and as a direct result of only needing to access those assets from one blu-ray disc. Multiplatform developers simply wanted to make the process of creating unified across all platforms and in the pursuit of parity, simply couldn't afford to offer 'more' to PS3 owners.
2/ Developers got lazy. That sounds a very cheap argument because it was used at the very beginning of the PS3s lifecycle when it WAS the difficulty that prevented developers from reaching the heights of first party devs. However, it isn't a cheap argument now. One only has to glance at the sales of games to realise that -- even though a lot of multiplat games are inferior -- these games still sold in reasonably good numbers on the PS3.
What ultimately caused that so called laziness then is the PS3 fan that accepted these ports. I never have and I never will, although I did make the mistake of buying Skyrim. Yes, the PS3 would probably have had less multiplats if people had boycotted these bad ports, but I believe, given time and a blatant warning from Sony fans, these developers would have HAD to get their act together. Basically, they got away with it because they could.
In conclusion: If you want great third party games on the PS4, don't buy inferior ports, wait for the exclusives and wait for third parties to get the message... oh, and don't obsess over who is winning, that will lead to you asking Sony to do silly things.