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The CEO of Gran Turismo developer Polyphony has had some less than kind words to say about the PlayStation 3.
In an interview with IGN, Kazunori Yamauchi said that development on Sony’s previous home console was incredibly difficult.
This is a sentiment that was expressed a great deal during the last console generation; that Sony’s hardware, while possessing the supposedly super-powerful Cell processor, was tricky to make games for.
As a result, the PS3 SKUs of many multi-format games were technically choppier when compared to their Xbox 360 and PC counterparts.
The difficulty in developing PlayStation 3 games informed Sony’s approach to its follow-up, the PS4. During the console’s announcement, Mark Cerny said that the platform holder had consulted with its development partners to help make a machine that was easy to make games on.
Yamauchi headed up development of Gran Turismo 5 and 6 during the PS3 lifecycle. Polyphony is currently working on Gran Turismo Sports, which is set for a November 18th release date. To date, the Gran Turismo series has sold over 76m units.
The conditions for GT6 were really against us, mainly because the PlayStation 3 hardware was a very difficult piece of hardware to develop for, and it caused our development team a lot of stress,” Yamauchi said.
So Gran Turismo 5 and 6 were really a nightmare for us.”
He continued: Compared to that the PS4 is a piece of hardware that really has the ability to answer to our expectations. I’ve said this over and over again but this, Gran Turismo Sport, it really has the level of innovation you haven’t seen since Gran Turismo 1 and we’re having a lot of fun developing it, and we’re discovering a lot of things as we develop it.
So it was actually good for us that we started developing for PS4 later on because we then really had the time to do [research and development] on the performance of the hardware which enables us to do things like the physics-based rendering, so it was really good for us that we weren’t in a rush to get something out.”
