Tretton blames third parties for PS3 software deficiencies

via Games Industry


Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz at an E3 roundtable, SCEA president Jack Tretton addressed the issue of some games looking better on the 360 than they do on the PS3.

“If the games don’t look good on the platform, consumers aren’t going to buy them. As I said, we can’t control what third parties are going to do,” explained Tretton. “We can try to evangelize the technology and assist those guys in development and try to convince them that it is in their best interests to take advantage of the technology.

“If we have to drive the message on our platform with the games that do that…whether they are first party or third…those are the games we are going to focus on and those are the games the consumers are going to make their purchase decisions on,” he said.

"At some point, what’s the point of porting it over to another platform if it is not going to look as good on a platform that is more expensive? Why waste any money in development doing that?”

When asked if that meant SCEA needed to pick up the slack with first-party titles, Tretton said that wasn’t the message he wanted to send.

“The message I want to send is, we can’t control what the third parties do,” he explained. “We want to encourage them as much as possible, we want to support them as much as possible…to your point, we want to give them the tools.

“We’re a company that does about 20 plus per cent of our business on first party, so believe me, I don’t want to send the message that we don’t need the third partes. We want to encourage them to maximize their development potential on our platform.

“But if a game doesn’t showcase our technology, I don’t know that is going to help either of us.”

Yeah sony.
Its not because you have a suck-arse system,
Just keeping telling that to yourself as you cry yourself to sleep.

I have to agree with Mr. Tretton. Some companies are developing games for Xbox 360 and then just porting them to PS3. I don't doubt that 360 is a very powerful machine. But when it comes to storage capacity for the disks; they really have to cut on textures, polygons or number of levels to fit everything in them. Just think about the amount of data that can be stored in a blu-ray disk compared with a regular Disk.

The VAST majority of PC games, with high res textures, high detail models and many levels fit on a single DVD.

Me thinks the Sony PR department has you on that one.

If the devs are choosing to optimize a game for the 360's hardware and then just make a so-so port for the PS3, I think it says more about the dev's/publisher's expectations of sales on each platform rather than their relative power.

That, and trying to optimize games for parallelism isn't an easy task.

I don't own either system.

Like as said before, "The PS3 is a bi*** to code for. Therefore workers demand higher payment for they're services."

I'm just gonna guess this has something to do with it...

Ive heard from the final inertia report that the Unreal 3 engine, which many amazing games are being developed from, is very static-y on PS3.

Dont point fingers, just fix problems :(

The PS3 has potential...is that its downfall? :(

the whole disk thing pisses me off!

360 can use DL-DVD disks that hold 8.5gb
PS3 can use blu-ray disks that hold 25gb

PS3 aint doin wat it should be doin becus game are bein ported instead of bein made on the individual machines!!

think of the difference in the games if there was a 360 version and a PS3 version were every last KB on the disk was bein used!!

I don't think its that the PS3 is so much more difficult to code for. There are quirks, yes, that make it more difficult (for instance some standard operations in C++ programming that work on a PC CPU, but do not work at all on the Cell). Other than that, its programming language (the Cell can supposedly interpret C or C++) isn't anything new. Just some new tricks.

As well, some companies just don't get it or are motivated by money. For instance, COD3 on the 360 has MUCH better support, with patches, map packs, etc coming out on a regular basis. The PS3 version got one patch, and that was it...

Some companies are doing their best to make the PS3 version of a multiplatform game better. For instance, there are additions to the PS3 version of Rainbow Six: Vegas that 360 users had to pay for and download later (PS3 users got them free). RS:Vegas also has a community option, which brings up your PSN's buddy list and you can receive messages in game.

DiRT is also another game that is being optimized for the PS3, looking and sounding better than its 360 counterpart. (from what the developer said)

So its not like these companies can't optimize their multiplatform titles for all platforms. They can. The question is, do they want to? As far as I can tell so far, some don't.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by paul1991

Yeah sony.
Its not because you have a suck-arse system,
Just keeping telling that to yourself as you cry yourself to sleep.

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That has to be the biggest n00b fanboy post i have seen in a long time, you sir are an ass clown.

Xbox 360 launch titles were ports from their Xbox counterparts, yet those weren't glitchy. So either third parties don't like the PS3 or it's because programming for the PS3 is more difficult.