Midway Games: Getting to the “Core” of the PS3 Development Issues

by Ian Ennis on November 3, 2007 at 12:19 am

We’ve heard before from PS3 developers that it’s not an easy machine to develop for. These latest statements from Midway indicate that the main reason for this is because the PS3 uses a multi-cored “Cell” processor, which is so different from the 360 that every game has to be rebuilt from ground up.

Since developers never did anything with multi-cored processors before the PS3, games have been severely delayed and faults were often seen in the final product in terms of graphics and frame rate issues.

Midway boss David F. Zucker had this to say about their development problems:

“For our first wave of next-gen games… lead development has been on the Xbox 360, due to its earlier introduction and larger installed base. We ran into some technical issues developing for the PlayStation 3 that have taken more time to finalize than we expected.”

“These include… making sure that the frame rate, networking, and graphical features are at parity between the platforms. We’ve also encountered challenges as a result of shipping two of the very first PS3 games using Epic’s Unreal Engine 3.”

It really does sound like they were having problems compared to the 360, but it’s not all bad. Zucker also said, “We do believe that these technical issues are now complete at a core level in our engine. Looking ahead to 2008, we expect the PS3 versions of our titles to ship day and date with the Xbox 360 and other SKUs.”

Now that’s what we like to hear. Hopefully more developers can follow this trend and we will see a drastic improvement in game ports to the PS3. Sony may have to play catch-up, but at least third-party developers are doing their part as well.

Source: Kotaku

Share This: