It’s fair to say that the PlayStation 3 is something of a weakling in the world of development at the moment. The development kits, up until recently cost around £10,000, the user base was rather weedy and the exotic architecture too different to the PC and 360 to really allow it to shine in crossplatform development. Indeed, even first-party titles didn’t fare as well as we would have liked. Fine, while the early efforts of studios producing multiformat titles were always going to be feeble, regardless of the machine, why is it still happening?

Is there a problem inherent in developing for and porting to the PS3, or is this simply a phase extended past what we deem natural due to lengthening development times? You can blame all the lazy developers you like, but this issue seems too widespread to be coincidence. As usual with Sony though, there’s no simple answer. The most prominent, and likely the driving force behind Sony’s status as the runt for the console litter is the head start that the Xbox 360 got. Pure and simple.

Having talked to a number of technical directors across the development industry, many of the issues we lament on a daily basis are down to the Xbox 360 taking so many users from Sony. That head start is a double-edged sword. It means on the one hand that the PlayStation 3 is a more technologically up-to-date piece of machinery, while on the other it’s caused a number of problems for developers. Developers make games and games are the lifeblood of any console. The knock-on effect of the PlayStation 3 not hitting around the time of the Xbox 360 meant a stunted market for the PS3, which is the main reason for the lack of effort going into development for the machine. As numbers of PS3s increase, so will the consideration given to development on the machine. If, in a year’s time, the PlayStation 3 is dominant in the marketplace, so too will it be dominant in studios. Ports will be transferring to the 360, rather than from them.

From a development point of view though, it’s a different story. There are valid reasons, to do with the architecture, why moving a title to the PS3 is difficult. While the PS3 has, effectively, eight processors to play with, Microsoft’s machine has around five and a half. However, visual processing is significantly more difficult with the PlayStation 3, due to the relative weakness of the RSX chip, the dedicated graphics processor. The Xbox 360’s Xenos, by comparison, does the job far better. It seems remiss of Sony, if that’s really the case, to have released a videogame console later than, and without the visual capacity of, its competitor. The PS3 requires a good deal of – and this was a word that came up a lot in our conversations with developers – shuffling, and that seems to have made developers slightly reticent about embracing the machine.

What the PlayStation 3 really excels at though, is physics. The accountant to the Xbox 360’s rock star of a processing rack, the PS3 shines in number crunching. It can deal with immense amounts of information. Titles like Heavenly Sword, MotorStorm and the upcoming LittleBigPlanet are proof of that, and in many ways we’re not too hurt by that trade off. It’s worth noting that this situation, with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 being opposed in such a fashion, hobbles progressive-thinking developers who are unable to go to town on either visuals or physics for fear of alienating one or the other console market. And we’re back to markets again.

The comparisons to the PlayStation 2 are more than valid in this instance. The end of the PS2’s life brought about a far greater understanding of the complex architecture of the unit, and it was only then that the real gems of the machine were being taken advantage of. Things like vector units gave developers a whole new playground to build on every aspect of a game, from AI to collision detection. The same, we’re sure, will be said of the PS3 in a decade-or-so’s time, once the secrets of the special processing units and the Cell have been unlocked. Developers are inventive folk by their very nature, and it will undoubtedly be a gradual process. For the time being though, we’ve got 300 plus games to look forward to on the console. More than enough to keep you busy.