PS3's power will be untapped for years - Perry

Former Shiny Entertainment boss Dave Perry has praised Sony's PS3 hardware, describing it as "the best piece of hardware, without question" - but claims that it will be years before developers tap that power.

Speaking exclusively to GamesIndustry.biz at GDC, Perry said that he hasn't seen "a single game that shows me the power of PlayStation 3."

"I haven't seen anything even close to what the machine's capable of doing," he claimed. "So that's the sad part for Sony - I feel really bad for them that somebody hasn't really stepped up to show us the hardware all singing, all dancing."

He attributed this under-utilisation of the machine to a common cycle in the console market, using God of War as an example of a game which finally tapped much of the power of a system which had been on the market for several years.

"The point is you're not going to get to see the PlayStation 3 for probably a couple of years, and then you're going to go, 'Wow, that's incredible.'"

Perry lays the blame for this problem squarely at the door of the hardware designers, who he believes have far too much control over the design of console systems. "This is how sad the industry is right now," he said. "If Sony thought of a way that their architecture designers could somehow add even more power for less money, but made programming a misery - actually made you just want to kill yourself - they would do it."

He believes that the way through this impasse is to allow top developers to have more input into the design of console systems, a move which he claims would help to "focus on what's important" rather than building in secondary features such as web browsers at the cost of both affordability and game functionality.

You can read the entirety of our interview with the ever-controversial Dave Perry on the site today.