Not a game developer, but I wrote a bunch of code specifically for the CELL processor for grad school at the time (and tested it on my PS3 at home - marking the first and last time I was able to convince my wife I needed a video game system "for real work"). It was fun to play with, but I can empathize with the time cost aspect: scheduling and optimizing DMA and SPE compute tasks just took a good bit of platform specific work.
I suspect a major point killing off special architectures like the PS3 was the desire of game companies to port their games to other platforms such as the PC. Porting to/from the PS3 would be rather painful if you were trying to fully leverage the power and programming model of the CELL CPU.
As things got more expensive we really started to see a switch from custom or in-house engines to the ones we’re so familiar with like Unity and Unreal.
Many developers couldn’t afford to keep up if they had to build their own engine, let alone on multiple platforms.
Far cheaper/easier to share the cost with many others through Unreal licenses. Your fame is more portable and can use more features that you may have ever had time to add to the engine.
It’s way easier to make multi-platform engines if each one doesn’t need its own ridiculously special way of doing things. And unless that platform is the one that’s driving a huge amount of sales I’m guessing it’s gonna get less attention/optimization.
It's not that the architecture was bad, it's that it's not easily compatible to other endpoints developers wanted to release on resulting in prohibitively high costs of doing a "full" port.
Well that wasn’t supposed to be the architecture either. The whole thing was supposed to be vastly faster and bigger with way more SPUs.
Maybe that would’ve been terrible, maybe not. Kinda sounds like yes in hindsight.
But the SPU‘s were originally supposed to do the GPU work too I think. So there’s a reason the GPU doesn’t fit in terribly well, it had to be tacked on at the end so the PS3 had any chance at all. And it couldn’t be well designed/optimized for the rest of the system because they were out of time.
I suspect a major point killing off special architectures like the PS3 was the desire of game companies to port their games to other platforms such as the PC. Porting to/from the PS3 would be rather painful if you were trying to fully leverage the power and programming model of the CELL CPU.