Wasn't it the case that some notable first party teams fed into into Sony's tool chain in the past? Continuing that process where the tools used by everyone have foundational contributions from the technical leaders would require that those teams have access.
PlayStation 4 (codename Orbis) technical hardware investigation (news and rumours)
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But it also give them the disadvantage if it's unstable & have some drawbacks.
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Sony does share a lot of stuff with first and second parties ahead of time and has for a while. This is mostly a known thing as people travel between companies and talk over drinks and such. I don't know first hand but I recall hearing that they had a special version of devnet for first and second parties on PS3.
That said I doubt there's much first party favoritism on this one. The GAF leaker's historical accuracy has been pretty low from where I stand.
That said I doubt there's much first party favoritism on this one. The GAF leaker's historical accuracy has been pretty low from where I stand.
It's being said often that first parties get information much earlier, but I doubt it, at least it can't be that cut and dry.
At the unveiling in March 2013, some journalists said the PS4's 8GB GDDR5 was only known by first parties, I knew for a fact this was false because many months before I heard from a third party dev that both their XB1 and PS4 devkits were 8GB. It just didn't leak.
In comparison, the plan to unlock a core isn't anywhere near that sensitive.
At the unveiling in March 2013, some journalists said the PS4's 8GB GDDR5 was only known by first parties, I knew for a fact this was false because many months before I heard from a third party dev that both their XB1 and PS4 devkits were 8GB. It just didn't leak.
In comparison, the plan to unlock a core isn't anywhere near that sensitive.
Turn 10 got to give DX12 a go before anybody else. I guess thats one of the benefits to being a first party dev as I can't see Sony being any different especially given that first and second party devs are given the task of providing differentiation for their respective platform.
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Devkits do not often represent the consumer version though(360 dev kits were using twice the ram [1GB] iirc), almost everyone was expecting 4GB GDDR5 for the Ps4, MS included most probably given the knee jerk reaction to the announcement (late overclock).
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Rikimaru
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Devkits were. Targeted retail was not.
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This really isn't any different to the consoles pre-launch.
They don't have to use it.
Depends how far back in pre-launch we are talking then
There were certain developers that were actually _present_ and had their needs and requirements placed into the construction of the hardware. Few if any third party developers were at that stage. I imagine most were on board as soon as there was a proper SDK kit released.
If we could use the XBO leaked SDK as guidance, many features found in first party games are announced as 'beta for testing' and usually not put into the final release until months later.
This could very well be the same case. IIRC async compute for Xbox was in 'beta' for at least 3-4 months before actually being a proper feature set of their SDK. The same goes with Tiled Resources. I'm not seeing that big of a difference here; I'm not dismissing your point entirely mind you - but with the limited information we have, I don't really think the first-party policy is malicious in intent.
One of the most famous example of dev influencing the hardware of the console was Epic Games. They showed MS how will Gears1 look with 256MB of ram and with 512MB of ram. Reports say that MS switched to larger Xbox 360 memory pool after that.
this story is quite parallel with the 8GB for PS4
history does tend to repeat itself.
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Games are available for launch, games take years to develop and the APIs and tools are not complete years in advance of launch so just do the math. Add in any game that launches in the first year after launch launch will have started development under that turbulent development environment and you're talking about every major publisher.Depends how far back in pre-launch we are talking then
I don't think Sony can really be faulted on this, if their openly described history with PS3 is still company policy. On PS3 they looked at their first party studios as competing with 3rd parties, but changed their mind and started sharing tech. AFAIK that's still how it works, and the rest of the industry gains access to Sony's internal ideas. However, they're still going to need a test-bed for developments. I suppose they could release everything Beta to 3rd parties from the beginnings but then they'd have a lot more support issues, and they're already bad at dealing with some of their indie developers (second hand reports from devs who have trouble getting responses etc.). Limiting WIP concepts to first party ahead of releasing to third party seems a good compromise to me, allowing faster iterative development using internal comms (theoretically anyhow) and closer connections between ICE and devs. There'd be no worries having an ICE engineer connect remotely to a Guerilla dev station to help debug.
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Sure they can. Games already have a TRC and undergo technical assurance certification which is where issues from any developer, not just Sony first party developers, should reveal problems of using new APIs or resources. And if Sony feel they need more testing then opening up things to more developers will result in more and more varied testing.
This does smack a little of the bad old days where both Microsoft and Apple's applications had disctinct advantages over third parties because they'd hook into private APIs and this is a practice both companies have abandoned because it is fundamentaly unfair to competitor's software. The 7th core resource availability is either stable or it isn't. If Sony are not confident that it's stable then test it more internally without advantaging first party software. If Sony are fairly confident then open it up and let more devs use it. If there are some obscure issues, the more people using the more apparant it will become. That is a fundamental testing methodology.
What's first party software if not internal field testing?
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Products that exist in a competitive and limited commercial market which should be a level playing field and where the manufacturer should not have an technical advantage particularly when they skim licensing on competing third party software?
I know that doesn't really roll off the tongue!
The acronym isn't easy to remember either. PTEIACALCMWS.... That's as far as I go
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