Ex-Guitar Hero and Rock Band dev slates PS3

A game maker who worked on the Guitar Hero and Rock Band games has launched a stinging attack on the PS3, saying “Sony let their hardware be designed by a comity of business interests rather than a well thought out design that would serve the game development community“.

In a post on his blog Jason Booth, who now works for the US-based Conduit Labs, explains “why ports to the ps3 will never be as good as their 360 counter parts and why most ps3 exclusives will likely continue to suck“.

Booth claims that the PS3 has “roughly half the pixel pushing power” of the 360, that Blu-ray is “great for watching movies, but not so great for games” and predicts only a “small number of PS3 only developers will optimize the hardware to do something cool“.

He said: “… getting equivalent performance out of the PS3 requires a lot of work unique to the platform, and in many cases, even with all these tricks, you still won’t see equivalent performance… game development is, at it’s heart, a resource management challenge. Given finite resources, do I have these five engineers work on optimizing the PS3 version to look better, or do I use them to make the game play better and fix bugs? Do I change my design to fit with what the PS3 hardware does well, or simply run the game at a slightly lower resolution on the PS3 to make up for it? Developers striving to push the PS3 hardware have often sacrificed their game in the process.“

He added: “This post might come across as a lot of Sony bashing, but it’s just the reality from the trenches. Sony let their hardware be designed by a comity of business interests rather than a well thought out design that would serve the game development community. They are going to loose hard this round because of it, and I hope that in the next round they take lessons from this round and produce a more balanced and usable machine.“