Wow. At least it's a start. College students have a leg up on Microsoft platforms because many of them have access to Microsoft's Visual Studio as one of the development platform choices.

XNA is close to that, though far cheaper since Microsoft is now including a 12-month trial with the MSDN Academic Alliance. However, no assembly used. However, it's really easy to get and less paperwork-heavy.

Still, it's a good start to have more students come out of college knowing how to work Playstation hardware.

Shin-san

Why just hva the dev kit for the PS2 and PSP, why not PS3 too, that way they have for sure a future basis for skilled developers for the PS3 in the years to come

PowerButton

@AssassinTRIP: That is more or less something a tool would say.

element7

They need to have a more open or atleast affordable educational initiative.

Making available the tools for PSN dev (as ChiChi_BBQ) said, is a great start. Have a contest. Offer some limitations to keep things in check and let people go wild. There's a great deal of potential out there and Sony need to embrace the word "communal" if they want to dominate.

Chupakun

@PowerButton:
Ps3 devkits are like 10000dlls a pop

Umenokouji Aoi

@Shin-san: Agreed. Definitely a good start considering the PS2 was one of the best selling consoles in history, PSP is a good entry point for light, casual games, and PS3 devkits might be too expensive and advanced for colleges. I would love to see more independent games on the PSN though.

ChiChi_BBQ

Just like Sony fanboys.
It's a tool.

AssassinTRIP

@element7:

And that's a reply that a tool would make.

AssassinTRIP

I know UMN has (had?) a class in real time programming using PS1s. I actually sold the professor my old ps1 when I bought a ps2 because they needed the older ones. This program, while spendyish, is going to be a great way to outfit a lab with some PS2s for teaching the class, I'm guessing.

dieman

Tell me, how does a "complier" work? ;)

haggis

@AssassinTRIP:
Why don't you kids like the Tool?

[www.fumettidicarta.it]

Combichristoffersen

Gotta get them hooked while they're young!

Talleh

That's fantastic; there's too many CS majors who don't actually CARE about learning all that more intensive stuff and just want to focus on the easiest technology available (ie Java, Visual Studio, etc) and think they're going to get a job in the gaming industry by taking the laziest route possible. Unfortunately academia still doesn't take game programming seriously yet...maybe this will change that.

happycodemonkey

This seems really stupid and overpriced considering the PS2 is on the back end of it's life cycle and this comes with special limitations. Sony has also gone a completely different direction with their hardware so the skills to program for PS2 won't be very useful in the future. The Wii will be around much longer and the architecture may even be used again in their next system. Wii dev kits are supposedly around $2000. Those aren't specially limited educational kits either. It would make much more sense to learn to program for the Wii than the PS2.

Spartan1308™

@AssassinTRIP:
And that's the reply a tool would make to the reply of a tool replying to a tool replying...
In short, shut up, the both of you.

misc.insanity

@Spartan1308™: Agreed, but the point is to just allow students to learn to program a piece of gaming hardware in general. You learn one thing, and the principles behind it, and the assumption is you can apply it to new systems.

happycodemonkey

I would love my school to carry all the dev tools to learn from. If the concern is to have a hands-on get to know basis with the consoles I'm for it. I feel knowing the limitiations and inner workings of various platforms are as beneficial as knowing what's inside your computer.

As for why current gen tools aren't used is an obvious reason. Would you like the secrets of your newest product line available to direct public access besides developers? When DigiPen arrived in the mid-90's they used SNES emulators provided by Nintendo when the N64 was launching. It's quite common once a console goes last gen and nothing really is to worry about in terms of "secret sauce" getting out do things like this become available... or already found on the internet.

TC

This initiative is extremely expensive, but the idea is very good.
Nowadays too many programmers of the younger generations don't know Assembly-language and constantly the users get flooded with MORE and MORE BLOATWARE. And when they ask on forums or their teachers whether they should learn the cpu language, the response is "it's useless, the compilers are good". This stupification that "compilers are good" has been present for 40 years!

somarix

"and not for art",

I'm glad they said that, they does need to be more emphasis on the mechanics and the engineering skills, even if you designing a game you need to learn the engine and learn programming skills.

Art teaches you neither of these, unfortunatly students I know don't seem to appreciate this and think they can get into the industry with an art qualification

MIKO

@somarix: Thank you for stating that, I completly agree. Right now I am learning ASM for the ARM7 and it's wonderfull. The amount of freedom you've got and flexibility is so much greater then if you use C or something.

I think it's just wonderful that you can programm the CPU in a way that you know exactly what's going on when it's running. Very good initiative from sony. The same is already possible on PS3 because CELL SDK is opensource and because they have released a lot of the datasheets of the CELL.

zerokill

At my college, they offered a video game class last semester. It was a collaboration between the computer science department and the art department. The goal was to make an xbox 360 game. At the end of the course, they had a games festival to showcase what each group had created, and people could come play the game and vote for their favorite. Unfortunately, the game that won happened to be the one that a fraternity brother was involved with - he had his entire fraternity show up to vote for their game and give everyone else a 1/5. It was an ok self help game that involved battling sheep. A little bit of a copy of some older flash games.

No one attended the lectures after the first couple of weeks because all of the material had already been taught in previous courses. I don't think they'll be bringing that class back (I don't see it in the course catalogue). At least they tried, I suppose!

I asked at one point why they picked Microsoft and they told me everyone else was too expensive and unwilling to work with the school.

sexylittlerobot

Question: Is there any word of this sort of scheme appearing in the UK? I'm starting my 2nd year of college soon, after which I'll be moving onto University. I'm planning a career in computing and perhaps games developement, so if this was available to me then it'd be brilliant.

OkayOctane

"A lot of schools are treating game education like trade school," argued Danks. "Too many students can't explain a pointer, can't explain memory caches, can't explain bus contention, can't explain how a complier works, cant explain a software rasterizer, can't explain a race condition…"

QFT! It makes me sick how people treat game programming as a mere simple trade. To be a great game programmer, you need to be well versed in all types of programming "arts" and know the hardware like the back of your hand. The most intellegent programmers I have ever met were on game dev teams. Programmers that do "normal" coding often arnt as good, organized, or efficient as game programmers.

kablammyman

I am a student... well, graduate that has just received final degree results... I will be officially graduating in September from a Computer Science (Games Development) course with a First. I'm not here to gloat (no-one here knows who I am) but to be an example. I can explain a pointer, and have a stab at a compiler, memory cache and rasterization, but wouldn't have been confident. Race condition sounded familiar (but didn't have much of a clue) and bus contention I would never have guessed.

Point is, I graduated with a top degree grade and I don't feel comfortable going for a programming job in the games industry. I think I'd have been better saving my money and spending those four years teaching myself and getting stuck in. Ideally, I'd like to be able to take my PS3 and develop simple games for it. I have also been considering buying a DS just so I can develop games for it with the homebrew kits - I seem to recall John Carmack saying it was a good thing to do.

Should I be considering starting at the first step with a DS after successfully completing a Computer Science course with a games development twist?

Obli

@Obli: Uwah, DS... it's a burden to code for it, compared to consoles and PCs, so I wouldn't suggest it for fun.
It's true that gamedev isn't a nice job. It's very unstable (those developers change companies and relocate often), the striving to push the limits everyday gets to you after a while, the salaries can be comparatively low for the amount of work done, projects take years to complete, ...
And worse of it all, it's like a research job, that has a deadline to complete the research successfully.

As a hobby, it's most fun to develop graphics on the PC, with OpenGL2.1 on nVidia hardware, and a DualShock2 connected to USB. Or DX10 on ATi cards, with at least 50GB/s VRAM bandwidth. Drawing everything with custom shaders (SM3 or SM4).

somarix