Krusher wrote:
It's stupid though to sell your development platform for too much money.
Give it for free and people will write code and make it populair = more sales.
That's not how console manufacturers see it though and indeed they have a good reason too from past experience.
See it's not that they couldn't give everyone access their kits, in fact Sony do let you use Linux and give you largely unfettered access to Cell. However giving anyone access to console development isn't their goal, they gate access so that you can ONLY release software for their platform if you've gone through them and they allow you too.
Opening their platforms as MS have done to some degree with XNA and Arcade _potentially_ risks their primary revenue stream being subverted.
It's not so much that it'd even be a real problem should open development be allow but as this gating of software release is what makes them the big bucks it's merely the potential disruption that causes them to come down so hard on preventing it from happening.
Hmm posting from work so that may not be totally coherent... what does that say about my job!?! :-D
Andy
