Remember when Rob Dyer tore Microsoft a new butthole and pretty much publicly buried the Xbox 360 in the dirt not too long ago? Remember that? Well, since you don’t the name of the article was “Sony says Microsoft is protecting Inferior Tech with Xbox 360”. Yeah, you remember now, eh? Well, a former employee of Vivendi came forward to speak out about how bogus Rob Dyer’s comments were about Microsoft and the Xbox 360, saying that Sony still lags behind the Xbox 360 when it comes to compatibility and developer-friendly tools.
In another flame-baitingly good article from Industry Gamers, the employee -- wishing to remain anonymous at this point -- spoke out about how Sony’s developer relations were actually worse than Microsoft and that trying to port games from one region to the next was a nightmare. Mr. Anonymous basically stated that…
"I'd say any comment by Sony that they have better developer relations or fewer insane hurdles is laughable. The TRC/TCRs [technical requirements checklist or technical certification requirements - Ed.] for the PS2 and PS3 were so much worse than anything needed for the Xbox 360 -- the cases themselves were written confusingly, but the real clincher was that they weren't even consistent between SoJ, SoE, and SoA."
Disgruntled, anonymous ex-developer-dude goes on to explain how small text-based errors would completely hold up localization procedures and bring progress to a halt over silly things like displaying “8MB” instead of “8 MB”. I mean, as we all know, it’s impossible to complete a game if you don’t know whether you need an 8MB memory card or an 8 MB memory card.
Disgruntled, anonymous ex-developer-dude also pointed out something that most of the industry was well aware of throughout most of 2007, saying…
"In contrast, the Xbox tools and support were always excellent, and the TCRs and supplementary FTCs [functional test cases - Ed.] were much easier to read, understand, implement, and test. They were also much more lenient about what was acceptable in a lot check, or making exceptions when it made sense to do so. I've heard Sony has greatly improved their tools support for development and testing, though I believe they're still lagging behind what the Xbox 360 had available at launch."
Those “claims” are not far-fetched in the least because it’s basically a reiteration of what Gabe Newell said about the PS3 years ago, just after it launched, along with a few other developers, including John Romero.
However, president of Valve, Gabe Newell, has changed his tune about the PS3 given Sony’s advancement in developer support and opening up the PSN for more creativity on the developer’s end.
Mr. disgruntled, anonymous ex-developer-dude finished his rant by saying…
"Again, things may have changed, but it still seems pretty funny to me that they could possibly try to call themselves always the better chance for small developers to get in, or some sort of indy safe-haven..."
Interesting words indeed, I get the feeling he won’t be one of the first in line to develop games for the PlayStation 4. You can check out the entire interview over at Industry Gamers.
