Thursday, January 11, 2007

id Software's John Carmack says that he isn't sure Sony will come out on top in the next generation [video game market].

"I suspect they're not going to overwhelmingly crush the marketplace this time, which wasn't clear a year ago," Carmack said at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas.

"A lot of people were thinking it's going to be a rerun of the last generation, and it's now looking like it might not be."

"The honest truth is that Microsoft dev tools are so much better than Sony's," he said. id intends to keep catching the PS3 project up with Xbox 360 development, and not the other way around.

"None of my opinions have really changed on that. I think the decision to use an asymmetric CPU by Sony was a wrong one. There are aspects that could make it a winning decision, but they're not helpful to the developers."

"I've been pulling for Microsoft, because I think they've done a better job for development support, and I think they have made somewhat smarter decisions on the platform.

The 360 has "probably the best graphics API as far as a sensibly designed thing that I've worked with," Carmack [said].