Final PS3 Development Kits Ship in June

[mwgiii]

March 14, 2006 - In one of several compelling announcements made in Tokyo at the 2006 PlayStation Business Briefing today, SCE president Ken Kutaragi confirmed that the final PS3 development kits will be shipping out to production houses in June. Additionally, there are 15 different companies making tools and middleware for the SDK.

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/696/696058p1.html

 

[jgantert]

So, what's the development time for a video game anymore? If the development kit comes out in June, how many games are going to be ready for a November release?

-John

 

[mwgiii]

The way I understand the development process of a new generation of hardware & software is:

Alpha hardware kits are given to "primary" software developers. Alpha kit is basically a souped PS2.

Beta hardware kits are distributed to most developers. Beta kits are close to the final version. Usually not as fast and often missing an important piece of hardware. In the PS3 case, it is missing the Blu-ray drive.

Final hardware kits are the acutal complete machine. In this case a fully working complete PS3.

So the bottom line is that the "primary" software houses have been working on PS3 games for a long time. Shipping final kits in June will give the developers plenty of time to polish the games and tweak them for any changes between the Beta & Final hardware.

 

[Dgenx321]

I've heard that the PS3 is a bitch to build games for.

Microsoft went out and set up XNA and you build it off of that and it ports right over to the 360.