The PS2 for sure was less powerful than the more conventional architectures of the GameCube and Xbox, but it was released 18 months before either of them in a time when Moore's law was still extremely relevant. Yet it could still hold its own against the competition. All pieces of impressive hardware.
(The lack of ram was definitely the biggest issue, and the thing that held back PC games the most as levels had to be made a lot smaller than they could have been otherwise - Destiny and Final Fantasy XIV are two concrete examples, both released expansions with much larger playable areas as soon as PS3/360 support was dropped).
Compared to other consoles of the same generation they were on par though.
Compared to top-of-the-line PCs of the same era yes. But the GPU alone of "PCs of the same era" would set you back as much as a 6th gen console, and you'd have a shiny graphics adapter sitting in a box.
The 7th gen is where consoles started really falling behind (though somewhat ironically also where MS decided to go with somewhat more bespoke hardware than the "PC in a box" Xbox).
The most serious competition at the time was the Nintendo 64, and it lacked storage.
PS2 dominated sixth gen sales. By being the winning console but releasing 18 months earlier it held back everyone. And since, like you said, Moore's law was very much alive this represented a significant reduction in overall quality for an entire generation. :(
PS3 at it's peak was great. But it took waaaay too much effort to get there making it a very poor value proposition for developers. And 7th gen was a fully multi-platform era so the end result is the average game was held back and only first party prestige titles could justify the extra cost.
It’s funny that this is always a criticism levelled at the CPU and not the developers.
Powerful custom hardware can be great for the developers that invest in it, until it isn't anymore and now you've got a bunch of sunk R&D. And then there's the need to ship on more than one platform...
And even if everyone were a super smart 10x-developer like you surely are, their time would still be better spent on a platform that is more productive. The idea that some technology is difficult but rewards proficiency with incredible productivity is almost entirely wrong, which is why nobody does web development in Assembly. LaTeX vs Word would be the only example I would have agreed with in the past, but if you search you'll find a study showing even the most proficient practitioners are slower and make more typesetting mistakes using the former.
That's not called for. They never implied they were even above average. Just that a bunch of game devs were somewhat lazy.
That's not called for. You don't know those developers, you don't know what work was on their plate or what constraints they were toiling under.
But they still weren't calling themselves some kind of better-than-everyone dev.
Though if you're using "developers" to mean that entire section of the company, including management, then what was on their plate and the constraints are almost all self-inflicted.
Assume you have a developer who is one of the best in the world at writing hyper-optimized SPU code. Imagine this dev WANTS to write micro-optimized assembly. (And there are many such devs). This developer's time would far more efficiently spent if they were writing "normal" code for a "normal" processor.
So yeah. The criticism belongs squarely on the processor. :)
Agreed. And that’s a good thing.
PS1, PS2, and PS3 were all underpowered. I’ll never forgive the PS2 for holding back games for 7 years. Grumble grumble.
PS3 may technically not have been slower. But if it takes 2x the effort to get a 10% improvement it is in practice.
Everything’s a PC now. Which means the focus can be on making good games instead of optimizing for specialized hardware to serve a fraction of the audience.