I know some guys who are ex-SCEA dev support. According to them, the attitude of Sony's American and European teams was one of frustration that the Japanese headquarters are hardware guys with no interest in software. They have always been severely underfunded compared to the Xbox dev support team and they've had to make do by pushing off a lot of the work to the third parties.
Yeah that meshes with what I know as well. However I'm pretty sure when I started on the PS2 pre-launch, SCEA dev support didn't even exist. Sony Japan probably didn't feel it necessary.
Which is probably why all our docs were in Japanese for the first three months.
It's remarkable in this context how one of Sony's primary strengths for the Playstation franchise has always (certainly PS1/PS2) been having the broadest third-party support of any console out there.
Well, this started with the PS1 because it was actually quite easy to develop for. It had good tools, the tools were cheap, and you could build your game in C.
Contrast this to the N64 at the time, which had a $1000000 buy in for a developer license, or the Saturn which was, by all accounts, a nightmare to develop for that made the PS2 look like child's play.
After that, the support comes down to the economics of numbers. Most devs I know would have gladly made games on Dreamcast forever, but (piracy/marketing/apathy) killed it, and the PS2 was all that was left.
A lot of japanese companies tend to consider software as not being as important as hardware... It's even more prestigious in Japan to study electronic engineering compared to computer science...
Because of that, the level of most programers I've seen working in big companies in Japan is surprisingly low.
Based on my limited experiences of interning at a Japanese software company, they don't have very good training or expectation of software people. At the company I worked for the vast majority of developers they hired had little or no previous programming experience.
The selection criteria was mostly based on how well the candidates performed on an entrance examination that consisted primarily of math and science questions.
The company then spent the first few years of the employees' life there training them how to develop software.
Based on what other people told me this kind of thing is pretty common practice.
