PS4 games need to be made better: Mark Cerny

PlayStation

July 1, 2013

Mark Cerny is pretty much the poster boy of the Playstation brand. He was the assigned architect of the Playstation 4 and has been in the gaming industry for over thirty years. He’s had his hand in many console-related pursuits, including Atari, Sega, the Sonic universe, Naughty Dog and Insomniac Games, and was right there in the beginning when the Playstation brand first launched and began to woo developers.

That kind of experience really does put you in a unique position. Given that he’s spent nearly four fifths of his life working on games, he’s arguably the best person to be speaking to when creating something as complex as the PS4. Cerny has seen for himself how games are made in various companies such as Electronic Arts and Activision, and was a major driving force in creating the way in how games are made by first-party studios for Sony’s Worldwide Developer Studios.

He recently gave a long lecture on game design for consoles through the ages at GameLab 2013 and his message was simple – that games need to be made to be more enticing to gamers and there need to be easier ways to make them.

Cerny also apologises (in between the lines) for how difficult and expensive the Playstation 3 was. He admitted that the PS3’s development was too clouded in how fast it could be theoretically and that the Cell engine, while technically advanced and a “enjoyable challenge” for Cerny himself, was simply too cumbersome and too convoluted.

Says Cerny, “In the years up to the PS3 launch we had the wrong idea about developing the PS2’s successor. Being in Sony’s studios we didn’t see it at the time, but in retrospect we had the wrong attitude about it. We had focused on the platform itself, rather than how making the actual games for platform could be an easier task for developers. In 2005 our focus was – and I’m sad to say – 99% on the hardware and 1% on the hardware. Many of the game developers who had early dev kits didn’t have the software and resources to make their games and our launch windows for the first-party titles was a little too ambitious”

Its one thing for a company to bring out a new product and say its better that their old one. Its an unheard-of thing for the man who drove nearly everything behind the scenes to publicly apologise for just about everything that made life hell for developers.

Interestingly, Microsoft did not have a presence at the Gamelabs conference. The company doesn’t really interact with third-party indie developers as much because their Xbox Live program requires a publisher for your game to land up on the marketplace, a practice which has driven indie developers to Microsoft’s competitors such as Nintendo and Sony, as well as the desktop PC.