Sony move to get games for P3
By Gareth Powell
The Sony PlayStation 3 was late. The Sony PlayStation 3 had some problems. Exit left, pursued by bear, Ken Kutaragi, the chief PlayStation engineer.
Probably none of what happened was down to him. It sounds a planning, logistics and manufacturing series of problems rather than pure engineering but, in the Japanese manner, someone was going to take the fall and that was Ken Kutaragi, the chief engineer.
As Voltaire said when the British shot one of its own admirals, Byng, it did it ‘to encourage the others.’ Does not sound like good management policy.
Now Ken Kutaragi has popped up as Chairman in a new games development company which is 49 percent Sony/51 percent Namco. This new company. called Cellius, will create Cell-compatible software — games that work with the Cell chip — which reportedly cost around $1.65 billion to develop and is the powerhouse in the PlayStation 3. And also, possibly, future formats including games and other entertainment content.
Cellius will begin operations on March 6 with a very modest investment of $823,000 which simply is no way near enough to develop serious games.
Looked at in one way this makes no sense whatsoever.
What sells PlayStations? The games that run on them.
Who creates those games? Independent companies not owned by Sony.
What will their reaction to being told that Sony is going to compete with them? They will not, perhaps, be happy. In fact, that last should be modified a bit.
You can make the argument that the creation of Cellius may stimulate the creation of games for the PS3 which is not selling as well as was hoped and is light on games.
Bit of a quandary was created by late delivery of the P3.
People won’t buy the platform unless there are a lot of games. Games manufacturers will not spend the massive investment in developing a game for a low selling platform. Simplistic answer, form a company to create games.
It may be the right answer because someone has to demonstrate how to make full use of what a processor which is, according to Sony, one of the most advanced chips in the world that enables ‘massive floating point calculation.’ Which, unless you are seriously competent, which I am not, means little.
An easier way to think of it is that Sony states the Cell chip enables the PS3 to perform some 35 times faster than the PS2. Which gives you sharper graphics, more complex games and a wonderful gaming experience. If the games area available to use all this power which they are not.
The problem is the Cell is unlike any other processor included in a gaming console and game makers have had difficulty developing games for it.
With the cost of game development running in the millions of dollars, game developers have not had a lot of incentive to develop games for the PS3.
So Cellius, with the genius of Ken Kutaragi, will create these games. But it is not something you can do over night. It will be some years before these games come out selling more PlayStation 3 and causing game manufacturers to create more games and on and on.
Sony should have seen this coming three years ago and created the company then, not now. If that had happened it is an even money bet that Ken Kutaragi would still be engineering happily away with the PlayStation.
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Stumble It!
January 28th, 2007
HUH? Did the writer of this article even pass elementary school english? I couldn’t even read past the first few paragraphs since the sentence structures don’t even make ANY sense and the grammar is horrendous.
January 28th, 2007
Yes, I did scrape through elementary school English but it would be fair to say my education has been slim.
I reread the piece. It is in English. Honest.
I am very keen on people criticising me for it makes me go back and see what I have done wrong. For if one reader – you – has problems with it and is moved to send an email I had better get my finger out and see what is wrong.
Technically it is grammatical.
There is a Shakespearan quotation — Exit left, pursued by bear — which, perhaps, should not be there. The quotation from Voltaire is showing off a bit.
I can see that and will do something about it. I was probably strutting my stuff — it happens — and that can be corrected.
As for the rest it is in pretty plain English and seems to follow logically. If I was the sub-editor dealing with this I would probably have struck out Shakespeare and Voltaire but otherwise let it run.
For the record I spend a lot of time writing — eleven books, literally millions of words. couple of film scripts — and yours is the first complaint I have ever had. I appreciate you taking the time to write and send it.
Gareth Powell
January 29th, 2007
I agree with ‘whatever’ very poor.