The PS3, for all its faults and victories, is nevertheless an iconic game console from Sony. Several of the best games ever made were released for the system back in the mid-2000s, and it kept going strong until its inevitable full retirement back in 2017.
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As such, it's an interesting thing to see just how game developers used to make games for the PS3 back in the day. And that's where this article comes in, when popular tech YouTuber Linus Sebastian of Linus Tech Tips recently got his hands on a massive PlayStation 3 dev kit - which Sony officially calls a DECR-1000A Reference Tool, reports PlayStation Lifestyle.
The video itself has already earned over a million views at the time of this writing:
In it, the PS3 dev kit was described as basically still a PlayStation 3 console - just far bigger and with way more functionality than the ones that actually hit the market. For instance, the I/O of the Reference Tool featured two extra USB ports, an extra hard drive, two network ports (one for devs, one for regular use), analog audio ports for sound mixing, and a VGA port for a monitor.
But what's going on under the hood is even more interesting. LTT revealed that Sony put twice the amount of memory in the Reference Tool (512MB compared to 256MB on retail consoles), 400GB of storage (retail consoles only had as much as 160GB), and a massive cooling system keeping the temperatures of all custom-designed electronics in check.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the kit, however, is the port for a foot switch. According to Sebastian, the port was intended to let developers (whose hands would be fully occupied) completely stop any code from executing in one fell swoop.
They then tested the unit to see if it is working, and it does. Soon after, they actually found a build of Gears Of War 3 (an Xbox 360 exclusive title) on the kit, which raised questions whether or not the game (or the Gears franchise in general) would've been multi-platform from the get-go. Either way, it was an interesting look into what PlayStation 3 game devs had to work with in the old days.
Read also: Mass Effect 4's Story To Be Led By Former Guardians Writer
Why Is The PS3 Dev Kit So Big?
It wasn't made clear why the dev kit itself is huge compared to a retail PlayStation 3 unit. But perhaps the most obvious reason is that game developers needed access to far more powerful hardware when actually making games. They then made compromises to make sure that the game they're making will run on the retail console - the PS3 in this case.
However, it could also be connected to just how notoriously hard it was to develop games for Sony's 7th generation console. So many developers were saying that it was a very unfriendly platform to make games on, with even Valve's Gabe Newell going as far as saying that the PS3 "is a waste of everyone's time," and investing in the console's Cell (CPU) architecture "gives no long-term benefits" (via CNET).
In the end, the PS3 may have technically shipped more units than the Xbox 360, but it was more or less proof that Sony could do more for both developers and gamers. And do more, they did. The PlayStation 4 was a radical, PC-like re-design that put the focus on making games for it easier, and this was continued with the PS5.
Sony never went back to designing extremely proprietary console architecture, and they should be thankful that they did.
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