Sony were happy they’d got “a tremendous lead over all the third parties on the system” – yes, really. “This was completely the wrong attitude, but we just didn’t know any better” he says.
Less than two years before the PS3′s launch, Cerny shifted to working on launch titles. At that time focus was “99% hardware, 1% software”. There was no debugging, no profiling, no graphics driver – it was all “in a primitive state” – and the third parties like EA and Ubisoft were “having an easily more difficult time.”
Engine development on PS1 took 1 month, on PS2 3 months, and on PS3 up to a year, Cerny added.
Of course, that all changed, and after the machine shipped Sony looked at “what worked and what hadn’t”, in order to look at what to change for PlayStation 4. This process was “inclusive and collaborative” for the first time, Cerny said. PS4 was originally going to use Cell again, at least it was an option to enhance it, but there were “other options”.
“Choosing a CPU would be a very big deal”, he admitted. “Timeline, business structure, development cost”. Cerny mentioned PowerPC and X86