Mark Cerny has been a part of the video games industry for a very long time. 31 years in fact. He's a pretty sharp guy and he's also the lead architect for the
PlayStation 4.
Below is a technical talk from Mark about the PlayStation 4. Mark goes through the history of the Sony consoles and probably the most talked about aspect of the presentation is the "Time to Triangle" piece. Time to Triangle is Mark's term for bringing an engine on a console to a point where it its close to theoretically what the hardware was capable of. It broke down to like this:
PlayStation: 1-2 months
PlayStation 2: 3-6 months
PlayStation 3: 6-12 months
PlayStation 4: 1-2 months
You can see where some of the development costs have increased due the increased complexity of the systems. With the move to the more familiar x86 architecture and other aspects, the time has been greatly reduced to what it was during the PlayStation days. Will this translate to quicker games to market? Time will tell, but as a programmer I'd be more interested in putting in features for a game rather than making the basic engine work, which the PlayStation 4 looks to do.
