According to Carmack in this video, Sony will not allow 3rd parties to release late ports of 360 games unless they improve the game in some way.

While I understand the reason, this surprised me a lot. It's interesting in a number of ways - the gamer's perspective, the business perspective, and, most of all, it showed me that Sony isn't as friendly to developers as I thought; I thought they were the most developer-friendly of the three, but I'm starting to doubt that.

That is certainly good for consumers, though it does encourage the developers to release simultaneous inferior ports to avoid having to add something to the game

@Munkeh111: The way I understood it, even if the port is a quality port, Sony wouldn't allow it unless the game is improved in some way. This resulted in them withholding the 360 port of Quake Wars so that they could release it on the PS3.

While the end result isn't necessarily bad, it's the method which baffles me. Microsoft is alleged to have moneyhatted 3rd parties for simultaneous releases, but Sony apparently goes as far as forcing this without giving any benefit back!

I can't say it's a bad thing, at least PS3 owners can benefit from this sort of thing from Oblivion or BioShock.
On the other hand, we have the early, inferior port like Munkeh said.
So it's a 50/50 good/bad for me.

Well, I don't really see how it's bad for PS3 users since they are getting a superior/improved product that those released on other systems.

The only people for which it is sorta 'bad' though are the Developers who have to work harder to add new things to the game and the people who bought the game on other consoles since they have to deal with the fact that they got an inferior port in the end.

No point complaining...

NJ5, Sony was only the most friendly towards third party developer leading up to and shorty after the PS1's launch. After they cemented their dominance of the industry Sony has been anything but friendly to third party developers. The PS2 was not only difficult to develop for but had extremely poor documentation. The PS2 was thought not to have hardware AA but it was later discovered that it in fact did but it was not noted in the development kit documentation. The PS3 followed the same path. Sony has had this policy going back to PS2. Its why Tales of Symphonia and Resident Evil 4 had bonus content on PS2.

Thanks for the info, I didn't know some of those things. I knew that Sony's technical side isn't great for developers, but I thought they were more friendly on the business side of things.

I'd also have thought they'd be more lax this time since they have the smallest userbase to offer to developers. This puts things into a new perspective for me.

Hey this kind of thing could backfire on them. If the Xbox360 gains "Enough" market share, it could see more third party exclusives just from this fact alone.

This certainly is a good move in my view.. firstly it will improve the quality of the port and also the PS3 user will get better game... so they will have some reason to buy for PS3.... I fully appreciate this move..

this is good ,, very good