Bethesda On PS3 Skyrim DLC: "It's our problem"

Having played Skyrim on the 360 I've been wonderfully immune from the myriad of problems PS3 users have been getting lately concerning the DLC. That main concern being...they aren't getting it.

Apparently Skyrim doesn't really sit well with the PlayStation 3, having brought a litany of problems to users from the very beginning. Bethesda vice president of PR and marketing Pete Hines tried to assure Sony's loyal following that they were still trying to solve the problems with Sony's help, but also take full responsibility for what must be quite the awful time for PS3 users.

“we've never blamed anyone or anything. It's our problem, and it's on us to solve it. “ Hines wrote on his twitter in response to some asking if they are placing the blame on the console itself. In a later tweet, Hines wrote that the problem is primarily performance based, possibly citing slowdowns for some PS3 users.

I can understand the frustration PlayStation 3 owners currently have with Bethesda, but I don't ever remember them “blaming the PS3” for the issues they're having with Skyrim. As much as it is always the developers responsibility to get their product up and running, it is also well known and documented that the PS3 uses a very different type of memory allocation and architecture system than on the 360 and PC, and this has caused some problems for developers in the past.

Back in 2011, for instance, John Carmack commented on the PS3 memory issue during the development of Rage. Speaking to Unwinnable he said:

“We had to make the game dominated by the console hardware trade offs. And the PlayStation 3 is, in some ways, the long pole there. They are close, the PS3 and the Xbox 360.”

“You don’t have to do radically different things, but the memory is a little tighter on the PS3 because it is segmented and Sony takes a little bit more off the top for their guide overhead than Microsoft does,” he said. “There is no doubt that decisions had to be based around what would work well on the consoles.”

You can be sure that both Sony and Microsoft do not design within a vacuum, and all of these issues are probably scrawled on a whiteboard somewhere in maddening strokes, so they are solved before the next generation hits.  Hopefully PS3 users will get these issues sorted out before that happens.