The PlayStation 3 is generally believed to be the most complex of the current home consoles, and concurrently the hardest to develop games for.
The Killzone 2 development team disagrees. Hermen Hulst, Guerrilla Games Managing Director, told GameDaily that Guerrilla’s "tech director doesn’t say [PS3 development is] particularly difficult. It’s specific, but it’s not difficult like PS2 was difficult – PS2 was a difficult [machine] to crack, but PS3 didn’t take us a long time to get up and running."
So, not as difficult to develop for as the infamously complex PS2? That’s not saying all that much. Development Director Arjan Brussee then stepped in to bring the comparison to this generation of consoles.
"I actually think PS3 is a simpler architecture than some of the other [current] consoles; you just have to have a certain mindset on how to address it," explained Brussee. "I think the Cell-based processor with the SPUs and the super high speed DSPs that you can throw all your calculation tasks at gives us a model that’s way easier to program for, even for junior programmers, than the general purpose multi-core type of architecture, which the PC and Xbox 360 have. … On the other platforms, you can have one processor dealing with AI and another processor dealing with rendering and another with game code, etc. And the synchronization of all that is so hard that it’s a huge complex issue to solve and get stable."
Ok, we’re convinced, it’s not that hard to develop PS3 games — now if only multiplatform developers would jump on the ‘PS3 lead platform’ bandwagon, PlayStation gamers would be all set.