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PS3 dev kits:$30,000USD

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Andrew2

Banned
Sony charges €25,000 for Playstation 3 developer kit

SONY HAS TALKED about the Playstation 3 and decided to tell the world of developers how to get a developer kit. In the real world, you actually have to pay for it but we kind of thought that Sony wanted to make more people to develop for their platform and give some of those kits for free. No.

We learned here at this conference that Sony is actually charging €25,000 for each developer kit that you order. Even if you have the money and if you want to buy one, you have to pass rigorous evaluations as Sony doesn’t want to give these complex machines away. With the kit you get the documentation and you can imagine what kind of secrets about the hardware itself are in those documents.

These machines are going to simulate what is later going to be known as Playstation 3 and you will get a bunch of developer software on it, it's a nice and expensive piece of machinery.

If you want one, ask Sony but you have to prove you have a game that is good enough for this console, and if Sony's hot shots decide it's good enough you are good to go.

Sony also added that for Europe, the company will have less than a hundred Playstation 3 developers kit at start but by the end of the year this number will multiply by ten, if you want to pay for it of course. µ



http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25855
 
They really expect Sony to give them away for free? Are they retarded?

For comparison:
With PlayStation 2, a few developers have told IGNPS2 that the cost for a single dev kit is higher than most companies can account for. Or had planned for. The cost for one development system is approximately $20,000. In retrospect, the original cost of PlayStation dev kits totaled about $4-5,000.
Click to expand...
Source: http://ps2.ign.com/articles/072/072936p1.html
 
Are they retarded?
Click to expand...
Given the typical writting quality of Inquirer articles - probably.

Anyway it is true that some of the checks required to get access to a kit are pretty out of whack (and have absolutely nothing to do with the games you're developing).
 
For comparison, the T-10000s (PS2 devkits) are about $10K. TEST units are $1K.
Xbox devkits are $3000 (I think) and Test units are in the range of $500 last time I checked.
Gamecube shit I have no idea.
 
I am not surprised. In fact, a couple of weeks ago, I was talking with a good friend about kits and the business around them.

This is one of the key differences between sony and ms. MS sees supporting developers as an expense, Sony sees it as a profit opportunity.

Also, you do not own development kits, you lease them.
 
Sho Nuff said:
For comparison, the T-10000s (PS2 devkits) are about $10K. TEST units are $1K.
Xbox devkits are $3000 (I think) and Test units are in the range of $500 last time I checked.
Gamecube shit I have no idea.
Click to expand...

T-10000s were something like 20k at the start weren't they?
 
Sho Nuff said:
For comparison, the T-10000s (PS2 devkits) are about $10K. TEST units are $1K.
Xbox devkits are $3000 (I think) and Test units are in the range of $500 last time I checked.
Gamecube shit I have no idea.
Click to expand...

Gamecube costs $10k to $20k according to warioworld.com

guess it depends on how much games you're planning to makes
 
Apparently, there will be a PC card released in about 6 months that devs can use to make PS3 titles, it will only compatible with certain brands of PC.

I have zero other information on it though :(
 
I'll be honest, but while this would most definitely hurt the much smaller developers, I don't give Sony any wrong for controlling the flow of the kits.

When you think about it, you had developers who obtained PS2 dev hardware, yet they don't deliver a single PS2 title. While its true its coming out said dev pockets, its a waste on Sony's side, and a waste they shouldn't have to put up with.

In the end, why should a dev who would have little interest in developing of X,Y, or Z platform be handed hardware just like that?
 
Sho Nuff said:
For comparison, the T-10000s (PS2 devkits) are about $10K. TEST units are $1K.
Xbox devkits are $3000 (I think) and Test units are in the range of $500 last time I checked.
Click to expand...
Actually Test Units are 500$. 1K$ is for mini-DTL (fully functional as a devkit, just has only 32MB of memory).

PS2 DTL-10000 started at 20k$ but dropped to 10K$ one year later (matching price of XBox kits, which were also 10k$).
GC kits started at 10k$+, no idea where they are at now.

Andrew2 said:
When you think about it, you had developers who obtained PS2 dev hardware, yet they don't deliver a single PS2 title.
Click to expand...
There's plenty of cases like that yeah - and they will no doubt happen with PS3 also, but at the moment devkits are still pretty scarce, so it's in Sony's best interest to only get truly interested parties on board.
Once they become available in larger quantities they'll probably drop price like they did with PS2 kits.
 
I love the implied outrage of the article, like The Inquirer just discovered how game console development works.

EDIT: Hah, they're reporting that the PS3 will have seven SPEs instead of 8 like it's breaking news. This has been known since E3.
 
tetsuoxb said:
I am not surprised. In fact, a couple of weeks ago, I was talking with a good friend about kits and the business around them.

This is one of the key differences between sony and ms. MS sees supporting developers as an expense, Sony sees it as a profit opportunity.

Also, you do not own development kits, you lease them.
Click to expand...

:lol

The prices are essentially the same. But, feel free to have whatever beliefs you'd like.
 
This policy of only allowing high-profile developers (or those with exceptional games) to have access to devkits is worrying. It must mean they either have poor yields or are really concerned about something leaking. I'll assume the former.

EDIT: Hah, they're reporting that the PS3 will have seven SPEs instead of 8 like it's breaking news. This has been known since E3.
Click to expand...
Its basically ATI + X360 land (by extension, most likely). Anything anti-NVIDIA or PS3 is posted in a half-assed drunken excuse for a news story, even if its old or made up.
 
tetsuoxb said:
T-10000s were something like 20k at the start weren't they?
Click to expand...

t1000.jpg


not bad for a killing machine
 
This policy of only allowing high-profile developers (or those with exceptional games) to have access to devkits is worrying.
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Things worked exactly the same way with PS2. If anything, PS3 kits have had better availability so far, not worse.
 
Why exactly do dev kits cost so much?

Aren't they essentially the final system + some extra memory?

You can develop Xbox games perfectly fine with an Xbox with 128MB of memory.

So where is all this extra cost coming from?
 
Ecrofirt said:
Why exactly do dev kits cost so much?

Aren't they essentially the final system + some extra memory?

You can develop Xbox games perfectly fine with an Xbox with 128MB of memory.

So where is all this extra cost coming from?
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The ability to develop games, the documentation, and the tech support?
 
The fucked up thing is that just about every dev and a few artists will need a kit. On an average next gen team I'd guess that you have at least 120 people. Say maybe 50 of them needed kits. That's 1.5 million just get the goddamned kits. That's 1.5 million before you've even started spending one red cent on a game, which these days have costs starting at around 10 or so million.

I fear for independent games. :(

The upside is that this is usually an up front cost that you can subtract from future games.
 
Wakune said:
The ability to develop games, the documentation, and the tech support?
Click to expand...

But still, isn't $30,000 too much? I mean it's not like Sony won't make money from every game sold.
 
jarrod said:
Expensive! What are PSP/DS/GBA kits? I read somewhere DS SDKs were only $1650 or something?
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No idea about others but IIRC PSP is 3-4k$.

sgt said:
I heard it's only $29,000 without the harddrive.
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Sarcasm aside, as a point of interest, PS2 devkits always had an internal HDD with Linux installed in there.
 
Mayor McCheese said:
The fucked up thing is that just about every dev and a few artists will need a kit. On an average next gen team I'd guess that you have at least 120 people. Say maybe 50 of them needed kits. That's 1.5 million just get the goddamned kits. That's 1.5 million before you've even started spending one red cent on a game, which these days have costs starting at around 10 or so million.

I fear for independent games. :(

The upside is that this is usually an up front cost that you can subtract from future games.
Click to expand...

It's still ludicris.

Paying $30k for a single machine is for the birds. They should do something like $1000 for each machine, and then have the tech support and documentation be a one time fee of $20,000.

Instead of $60,000 for two machines, you'd be paying $22,000. Your essentially paying for what, a help file, and whatever they're using for their SDK. The price just seems unnecessarily high to me.
 
Mayor McCheese said:
On an average next gen team I'd guess that you have at least 120 people.
...
I fear for independent games. :(
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If you think that independant games can afford 120 people on AVERAGE, then you have absolutely no reason whatsoever to fear about development kits costs.

Just try working out yearly wages for a team of 120, and them see if you still want to come back telling us about 30k kits being expensive.
 
Fafalada said:
If you think that independant games can afford 120 people on AVERAGE, then you have absolutely no reason whatsoever to fear about development kits costs.

Just try working out yearly wages for a team of 120, and them see if you still want to come back telling us about 30k kits being expensive.
Click to expand...

POINT. MISSED.

While I'm not him, I'm pretty sure he meant to imply that independent game devs will be hurt extremely more by these prices.
I don't know what Sony priced PSX dev kits, but there was tons of shit coming out for it from everywhere, and that's part of what made the PSX so good.
 
Fafalada said:
Point is that if 120 is a team average for next gen games, independant devs will be bankrupt long before they try shopping for devkits.
Click to expand...

Whatever you say chief. If the company is dedicated (whips) enough, I'm sure smaller teams could still do it, but these prices sure ain't helping it.
 
Ecrofirt said:
Why exactly do dev kits cost so much?
Click to expand...
As had already been pointed out in this thread by the time you asked this, there's a couple of factors at work. First this is only the price for PS3 devkits *now*, it should decrease over the lifetime of the platform. The high price *now* reflects the fact that Sony has a limited production capability for these things at the moment and so naturally wants to ensure that the devs/pubs that get them are the ones most guaranteed to actually use them to produce PS3 game content. Anyone willing to spend multiples of 30K on devkits would presumably be pretty serious about get software out on the PS3 to begin to get a return on the investment ASAP.
 
"As had already been pointed out in this thread by the time you asked this, there's a couple of factors at work. First this is only the price for PS3 devkits *now*, it should decrease over the lifetime of the platform. The high price *now* reflects the fact that Sony has a limited production capability for these things at the moment and so naturally wants to ensure that the devs/pubs that get them are the ones most guaranteed to actually use them to produce PS3 game content. Anyone willing to spend multiples of 30K on devkits would presumably be pretty serious about get software out on the PS3 to begin to get a return on the investment ASAP."
Click to expand...

they don't need to stick a high price tag on it to do this surely? they just say "we're looking at your application, we have a number of units, but we have other companies to talk to" or they could use their "screening" process to make sure rich people just wanting to fuck around aren't taking up valuable resources.
 
RevenantKioku said:
If the company is dedicated (whips) enough, I'm sure smaller teams could still do it, but these prices sure ain't helping it.
Click to expand...
That's not what he was saying though, he claimed 'average team size' will be 120. If that happens, we'll have average game budget ~30-40Milion.
That's at least 10x more then current generation, and people complained how things were too expensive already for the last 5 years.

And the arguments goes right back at you here about 'dedication' - you don't actually need 50devkits for 120people, nor you will need that many for smaller teams. Heck teams of 10-20 often get by with 1-2kits early on in generation.

DCharlie said:
they don't need to stick a high price tag on it to do this surely?
Click to expand...
Supply and demand - obviously people are still getting them. Later on they'll make things cheaper as they see fit.
Sony has already gone to great lenghts to provide cheap devkits on PS2 over its life, PS2 is the only current gen console where you can buy a new development kit for 1000$.
 
AndreasNystrom said:
Lets hope crappy developers wont afford this one ;)
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What's wrong with crappy devs? Some devs get better over time, and some get worse. It's the nature of things. Less devs, less choices, higher prices. Not good in my book. While the majority of us have high end tastes for games, most people don't and will buy games we consider below us. I cringe at some of the games I sell when I work retail, but that's what taste and options are all about. While most of us could do without shitty licensed shovel-ware, that shit is helping to keep costs down because high end devs still have to compete with $20 poker games, or that new licensed Nickelodeon character game. I'm sure there is something else I'm missing in this equation, but I don't see crappy, or even smaller, independent devs as that much of a problem.
 
Mayor McCheese said:
The fucked up thing is that just about every dev and a few artists will need a kit. On an average next gen team I'd guess that you have at least 120 people. Say maybe 50 of them needed kits. That's 1.5 million just get the goddamned kits. That's 1.5 million before you've even started spending one red cent on a game, which these days have costs starting at around 10 or so million.

I fear for independent games. :(

The upside is that this is usually an up front cost that you can subtract from future games.
Click to expand...

I don't know who you work for or which company you're basing these numbers on, but a development team of 120 will NOT need -50- devkits.
 
Fafalada said:
That's not what he was saying though, he claimed 'average team size' will be 120. If that happens, we'll have average game budget ~30-40Milion.
That's at least 10x more then current generation, and people complained how things were too expensive already for the last 5 years.
Click to expand...

I know what he's talking about with 'average' but he was weeping for independents, whose numbers will probably be no where near the 'average'. And the smaller you are, the bigger costs hurt you even more.
 
Ecrofirt said:
Why exactly do dev kits cost so much?
Click to expand...

It's not much different than the PS2 dev kits or the 360 dev kits.

1) Not everybody gets a dev kit early on. In fact, there are so few dev kits available that availability alone assures that.

2) As Faf said, you pay a programmer an average of 70k per year. With benefits, payroll taxes, supplies, etc, etc, you can essentially double an employees salary to determine what it costs a company per employee.

I'm sure devs wish they were less, but that's always been true. The outcry here just shows the lack of knowledge that many here have regarding dev costs.
 
Tempy said:
I don't know who you work for or which company you're basing these numbers on, but a development team of 120 will NOT need -50- devkits.
Click to expand...

Yeah, ideally, they'll need 100-120 :(

Fafalada said:
Sony has already gone to great lenghts to provide cheap devkits on PS2 over its life, PS2 is the only current gen console where you can buy a new development kit for 1000$.
Click to expand...

I didn't know about the mini devkits - what do they look like?

To be fair, you can also use an Xbox Debug Kit (green) as a devkit, you lose a couple of features but it has the same amount of memory as a normal devkit (clear)...I think the debugs are sub $1K?
 
sonycowboy said:
The outcry here just shows the lack of knowledge that many here have regarding dev costs.
Click to expand...

Well rising costs are never good, but if Fafalda's estimates of 10x more are spot on, I mean come on. A little outrage is due I'd say. I mean look what we're getting. Prettier versions of shit like Killzone. Yay?
 
DCharlie said:
they don't need to stick a high price tag on it to do this surely? they just say "we're looking at your application, we have a number of units, but we have other companies to talk to" or they could use their "screening" process to make sure rich people just wanting to fuck around aren't taking up valuable resources.
Click to expand...
I don't think there's any one perfect approach, which is why they seem to be combining screening methods. Pricing is the coarse adjustment while review of submitted applications is the fine adjustment. If they kept devkit prices signifcantly lower and relied more heavily on application review for screening, they'd get more applications which isn't what they necessarily want at this point and just makes for more manual labor in the screening process potentially slowing down the delivery of devkits to even the most intent of potential PS3 developers.
 
RevenantKioku said:
Well rising costs are never good, but if Fafalda's estimates of 10x more are spot on, I mean come on. A little outrage is due I'd say. I mean look what we're getting. Prettier versions of shit like Killzone. Yay?
Click to expand...

Oh, I definitely agree that dev costs in general have gone up. Number of employees is climbing, technological requirements, and hell, just salaries have risen considerably over the past 5-10 years for quality folks.

However, the dev kits is what we're talking about here and they're only a sizable drop in the huge dev cost buckets were talking about here.
 
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