If you listen very carefully, you can hear the crunching of
thousands of Sony fanboy's teeth (or is that just my recently purchased second hand gaming PC?) because of the news
that John Carmack of id Software fame is backing the Xbox 360. He's gone on the record at the recent QuakeCon with a
killer quote that the Xbox 360 is "the best development environment" he's seen for a console. If I
had a geek -> english translator handy it'd probably translate as "the 360 is my fave next-gen
console".
According to Carmack, the Xbox 360 has the best architecture and development tools so the game devs can do their jobs better. In contrast he thinks the PS3 will be harder to develop for with inital games being disappointing as a result. Now, before the fanboys eat me alive, Carmack doesn't think the PS3 is useless. His hopes for the PS3 lie on the possibility of the PS3 being a more open platform than previous consoles, with developers being given more freedom to make patches and mission packs without permission or registration. The chances of Microsoft ever allowing this kind of freedom are slim to none.
So a semi-retired game guru
thinks the Xbox 360 will be a better development platform. Does this say much about which console will win the war? Not
really, since it's widely held that the PS2 was harder to develop for than the original Xbox. The reality is that
developers will develop for whichever console sells the most games and that's determined by how many people own each
console; Catch 22.
[Via Iqniq]
