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Sony Buys SDKs for PS3

Sony made two big business moves this week in an effort to make the PlayStation 3 a more user-friendly platform to develop for.

On Wednesday of this week, the company announced that it was buying SN Systems Ltd., which is best known for its ProDG development tool and a suite of tools aimed at PlayStation 2 development. Sony hopes that the purchase will help bring the ProDG suite to the PS3 and help accelerate the development of other dev tools onto the PS3 platform.

SN Systems, based in Bristol, UK, has been making development tools for a variety of platforms since 1989.

Following that announcement, Sony revealed that it has entered into a licensing agreement with Ageia Technologies, that will allow Sony to include Ageia's PhysX Physics SDK (also known as NovodeX) in the PlayStation 3 software development suite.

In a bold move, Sony will provide frontline support to developers for all of the tools included in the PlayStation 3 SDK. One complaint developers had about the PlayStation 2 was that Sony had little documentation and support for its development tools. It looks like PlayStation 3 will jump out of the gate with better tools and better support, which will ultimately help developers produce games quicker and more affordably.