Sony’s claims that the platform holder enjoys better developer relations than leading rival Microsoft is “laughable,” a former Vivendi employee has said.
Speaking to IndustryGamers, the dev, who wishes to remain anonymous, commented, “I’d say any comment by Sony that they have better developer relations or fewer insane hurdles is laughable.”
“Things may have changed, but it still seems pretty funny to me that they could possibly try to call themselves always the better chance for small developers to get in, or some sort of indy safe-haven.
The anonymous dev went on to label Sony’s technical certification requirements for PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 as being “so much worse than anything needed for the Xbox 360.”
“I heard a lot of horror stories about the PS3 dev tools, and our launch-title devs got absolutely no support from Sony itself when they needed it – up to and including Sony calling one of our developers liars when we said their networking code wasn’t working for our game, and it was a problem with their system,” the source continued.
“In contrast, the Xbox tools and support were always excellent.”
Speaking in regards to Xbox documentation and requirements, the source said Microsoft’s efforts “were much easier to read, understand, implement, and test,” as well as “much more lenient about what was acceptable in a lot check,” noting the 360 console maker was willing to make exceptions.
“I’ve heard Sony has greatly improved their tools support for development and testing,” the source grudgingly conceded, “Though I believe they’re still lagging behind what the Xbox 360 had available at launch.
“I don’t recall Sony PS3 Dev Kits being cheap – our test boxes were something like $10,000 each, and the actual development kits were significantly more – or anything like the Developer Net attached to XBLA allowing anyone to just jump into development with a low overhead cost,” the source added.