Mark Cerny, the PlayStation 4's lead system architect, has given a keynote speech at the Barcelona GameLab conference entitled 'The Road to the PS4' in which he discussed how the puzzling architecture of the PS3 led to a weak launch lineup and how that in turn changed Sony's attitudes.
Cerny said that when making the PS3 Sony had a "99 per cent hardware, one per cent software focus" and added that developers found working the consoles Cell processor to be "like a puzzle".
Early on in the PS3's development Cerny was tasked with creating a demo for Sony's internal teams to show what the console could do however, he conceded that he "wasn't thinking about the practical realities of game development," adding that while first party teams "cracked the code" third party developers were struggling.
"Our feeling was that EA and Rockstar better watch out. This was, of course, completely the wrong attitude. We were thinking about our games and not the platform," Cerny commented. He said Sony's hardware centric approach let to a "weak lineup" for the console's launch.
When the PlayStation did make it to the market Cerny noted "The entire dev environment was ina very primitive state" and this weakness led to "a complete turnaround in attitude".
In making the PS4 Cerny commented "we didn't want the hardware to be a puzzle. The concept is that as game developers learn to use these techniques later on in the lifecycle, we'll see richer worlds."
He said designing the PS4 was a "fundamentally developer-driven process."
In an interview published yesterday Cerny spoke about seeing the PS4 for the first time; something which didn't happen until Sony's pre-E3 media briefing earlier this month and also spoke about Knack, the launch title he's developing for the console.
The PS4 is set to be released later this year with "all guns blazing" and has been described by Sony's CEO Kaz Hirai as "first and foremost" a game console.
Source: Edge.
