Oddworld Creator: PS2/3 "Put Half The Dev Community Out of Business"

[WhiteTigerShiro]

The PS2 "hard to develop"?... Uh... Really?, I mean, there's literally hundreds upon hundreds of games for it, I thought it was the easiest to develop.

Hmm... And yet, somehow, PS2 is the the best selling console in history with biggest library of HIGH-quality games.

As has been observed many times in the past (and possibly already pointed out on this thread), the PS2's success had little to do with anything Sony did, and nearly everything to do with circumstance and luck. All that PS2 had to do to succeed was exist during a time when the only-other options on the market had a terrible reputation they had to shake-off. Nintendo was fresh off of the N64 that a lot of people hated for sticking to cartridges, not to mention that this was the time when their "kiddie" image was as strong as it had ever been. Meanwhile the only-other competition was the dying Dreamcast, and Microsoft whom people were still angry about getting into the console business in the first place. So yes, of course the PS2 was going to be the console of choice for that generation. Since it was the console that everyone was buying, of course it was where developers were going to have to go, whether they wanted to or not; hence the massive library of games.

 

[cikame]

I'm not a developer so i couldn't say, but i will say that there's no reason why all the best PS2 games couldn't have been Xbox or even Dreamcast games, it's just that the PS2 came out first and made the best case to game makers.

 

[flying_whimsy]

Kutaragi's confidence lay in his assumption that top dev teams would simply overcome the challenge presented by the hardware, and discover how to make great games regardless.

In other words, rich dev teams.

I totally agree with Lanning: I don't think the ps2 and ps3 are worthy of a lifetime achievement award. The PS2, maybe (and it was more luck than anything), but I can't look at the PS3 and think it garners that kind of recognition. Both of those systems only hit their technical peak shortly before they were replaced just by sheer virtue of the fact that they were so dev-unfriendly. Remember the eye toy, the hard drive and modem, the other OS option, backwards compatibility, and the move? Both systems did have their failures, too.

Also, I'm still really pissed at the sony marketing for the ps3 slim: "It only does everything." for a version of the system that had half of its features ripped out. That was probably one of the best instances of real life doublethink I've ever seen.

And just in case anyone thinks I'm some kind of anti-sony person: I absolutely love my ps2 and still play it regularly (and my ps1, for that matter): save for pc, my gaming library is dominated by sony consoles.

Sorry, I went a little off the rails there.

 

[thebobmaster_v1legacy]

I'm not a developer so i couldn't say, but i will say that there's no reason why all the best PS2 games couldn't have been Xbox or even Dreamcast games, it's just that the PS2 came out first and made the best case to game makers.

Actually, the Dreamcast came first. Dreamcast came out in 1998 in Japan and 1999 elsewhere, while the PS2 launched in 2000 worldwide.

One thing I want to point out that at least contributed to the PS2's success at launch was not just its price...but the fact that it was one of, if not the, cheapest DVD players on the market at the time. A DVD player that can play games for a lower price than many DVD players? Sold! That, and because of being backwards compatible, it was able to retain the Playstation audience it already had without having to sacrifice any of them that didn't want their game library to suddenly become obsolete.

Did the PS2 have a solid games library? Yes. Was its success due to the games alone? No. Was it easy to develop for? Hell no.

 

[MorganL4]

Hmm... And yet, somehow, PS2 is the the best selling console in history with biggest library of HIGH-quality games. Even if what this person is saying is actually true, then maybe the industry really needed to lay-off half of the employees to become better?
Although I doubt that Mister Lanning is right. He is probably, as FalloutJack said

butthurt

You do realize that he included the PS3 in his statement right? You do remember the three year period where no one bought the PS3 unless they wanted the cheapest Blu Ray player, because as a gaming device it had nothing to offer, right? You do remember countless developers lamenting the design of the PS3, and moving to develop for the 360 or the PC instead. Ironically, the difficulty of the PS3's development could be directly tied to the resurgence of the PC as a gaming device. If you don't remember what I am talking about then there is a video you can watch: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/84-Console-Rundown

So, yes while the PS2 might have been easier to develop for I personally have no experience with it so I can't claim it was easy. But we KNOW that companies went bankrupt because the doubled down on a console that took too many resources to develop for, and then because other people had jumped ship, by the time your game DID come out everyone had bought a 360 and a cheap Samsung blu ray player instead, and so you had a comparatively small market in which to recoup your losses. All the problems of the PS3 compounded on themselves to the point where Sony not only lost the Gen 7 console race, they barely managed to leave the starting line before we were all looking ahead to the PS4. Personally I only bought a PS3 about 6 months before the PS4 was announced.

THAT is why Lanning was so pissed. He watched friends and former colleagues go into bankruptcy and be forced out of the industry. And then saw one of the men who held a large part of that responsibility getting a lifetime achievement award. Quite frankly, I think I would be pissed off too if I saw that happen.

 

[Vivi22]

Butt cereal, can you really blame the guy for being mad when the person who put him and his friends through such hard times is being lorded. I'm not saying the Playstation guy doesn't deserve the award just that I can see why the other fella's pissed.

I can't see why he's pissed or how Kutaragi put him through any hard times. Lanning and his company never developed a game for the PS2 or PS3. In fact, their only experience with either was the remake they published but which another team developed which is available on the PS3 and only came out last year.

The man can't argue that PS2 and PS3 dev costs hurt his company when he never made a game for either console, and Microsoft and EA published their two Xbox games.

Hell, to be perfectly honest, I have a hard time taking the mans thoughts seriously when the last title they actually developed themselves was in 2005 and they never made anything for the consoles he's lambasting. What makes a developer that doesn't develop in the lifetime of the PS3 an expert on the issues with developing for the PS3? And it's not like the Xbox 360 being easier to develop for kept budgets down either. And it's really ballooning budgets in general which give the little guys a hard time and that's had a lot more to do with lack of affordable development tools until the last few years than anything else.

The man talks about the problems with the industry over the last 15 years as though he hasn't actually experienced them, which is largely accurate as far as I can tell.

 

[Vivi22]

But we KNOW that companies went bankrupt because the doubled down on a console that took too many resources to develop for

I can't think of a single company that went bankrupt because they only developed for the PS3. Hell, I can't even think of a company that Sony didn't own that only developed for the PS3 considering this past generation might as well be known as the multi-platform generation. Feel free to provide some examples otherwise if you have them, but I would suspect there aren't many.

and then because other people had jumped ship, by the time your game DID come out everyone had bought a 360 and a cheap Samsung blu ray player instead, and so you had a comparatively small market in which to recoup your losses.

This isn't actually true you know. It is true that the 360 was outselling the PS3 for quite some time, but a lot of people don't seem to realize that when viewing sales from the perspective of time since console launch, the PS3 was selling faster than the 360 had from the start. It's part of the reason the PS3 overtook it in market share in the last couple of years. And while the PS3 may not have been the success the PS2 was, it was far from the dismal failure sales wise that everyone liked to say it was for years. The truth of the matter was that every single month that went by it was actually closing the gap with the 360, and the idea that it had too small a market to be worth developing for is largely a myth perpetrated by people who wouldn't know how to do some useful sales analysis if you threatened to bludgeon their mothers to death with a launch model PS3. And those things were fucking heavy. That'd hurt a LOT.

So yeah, point being that the 360 was slowly losing ground to the PS3 from the day the PS3 was released. It took a while for that gap to finally close, but if it weren't for the year head start Microsoft had we would have seen a much different story being reported.

All the problems of the PS3 compounded on themselves to the point where Sony not only lost the Gen 7 console race

Again, if we're going to view losing the gen 7 console race as being the console with the lowest sales, that crown technically belongs to Microsoft unless things suddenly flipped recently and I didn't notice.

 

[EHKOS]

Well, if the half consisted of developers on the level of Steam's Greenlight page, maybe that was a good thing. Sure, it sucks that people weren't able to keep a job they wanted and work on their art, but it's the same reason why music artists and actors have to work amazingly hard to break into their careers. My fingers are terrible at operating a guitar, but that's not the fault of the hardware, and people like Zakk Wylde prove that.

I suppose he's allowed to pout, but maybe he should have just complained to a group of friends at a bar.

 

[Strazdas]

so a failing developers that do not keep up with technology and have no ability to adapt to new hardware has failed. this is bad how exactly?

 

[weirdee]

as noted by the facebook comments, many people also bought the ps2 because it was cheaper than many other dvd players at the time

frankly it's great how many people on this board pretty much pretend they know how to talk shit about developers when they make up facts based on wikipedia level knowledge