The PS3 has been around for some time now, and still it doesn’t have a lot of games. More annoyingly, most games for the platform are crap — either fully or compared to the Windows and Xbox versions of the games. A few of the games are decent — but they are not all over the place. A lot of developers have been complaining about the console — which may be one of the reasons why the PS3 doesn’t have a lot of games.
I think I have a solution to the problem. First of all Sony has to realise that to gain control over the market, they have to release (some) control over the console. This control will actually not be lost, but shifted, if my proposal is followed. One thing that’s bugging a lot of people is that you have to pay money to develop games for the console. That may seem like a minor problem as you also have to pay money to develop stuff for the XBox and the Wii. The difference (from the XBox) is that the XBox in many ways is just a stripped down Windows machine running on a triple cored Power 970. You can make a game for Windows and be reasonable comfortable that porting won’t be a too big issue. In some cases, it will be very close to just doing a recompile for the XBox. The PS3 is completely different. As far as I know, it doesn’t look like anything else. I have no details on the SDK, but there is no reason that it should look like any other operating system and the fact that it has a completely new type of processor, may seem frightening to some people. Of course the Cell processor should just be seen as yet another “GPU” like processor and the SPEs should just be treated as an easily accessable set of GPU cores — not like a real part of the CPU.
The first part of my suggestion is this: release the SDK to the public. Allow anyone to develop and publish software for the PS3. Then, make all game disitribution go through PlaystationStore. It is extremely convenient to buy games of PlaystationStore and it adds that you don’t have to have disks lying around or change them to play another game. Further it means that Sony is the only middleman from the developers to the consumer, which can result in two things: cheaper games or increased profit (both for Sony and for developers). If the cheaper games option is chosen, it’s not unlikely that it will also increase profits.
The second part, which is a bit more drastic is to revise the Playstation 3 console itself. Add a lot of memory — at least a total of 1GiB — and increase the harddrive capacity to at least 500 GiB. The extra memory reduces the problems developers have had with the PS3 operating system hogging up to 84 MiB of the preciouse 256MiB of memory it has. Furthermore it will make it feaseable to run GNU/Linux on the machine, which is rather painful at the moment.
