Square doesn't need any financial incentive from MS to decide that it's in their best interest to release on the 360. After you've spent $30 million developing it for PS3, the amount of money to move it to 360 is far smaller. You have all of your art assets, design, and large chunks of code ready to be pulled over directly. Seriously, it wouldn't surprise me if porting it to the 360 costs them less than a million. When you stop to think that their audience in the U.S. is much greater on the 360 than PS3, Sony would have to pay Square a great deal of money to convince them NOT to bring it to the 360. Evidently, Sony can't afford to pay Square off for the amount that Square would be sacrificing.
Like it or not, there is also another simple fact here. Microsoft makes the best software developer tools in the industry. That's what they do. There is nothing close to legitimate competition here. So it shouldn't be at all surprising that the 360 is winning the favor of many software developers, especially when the PS3 forces you to do a lot of fancy multi-processor programming to take advantage of it. Microsoft did something very smart here. They created a product which, while it may have less total power, would work just as well if not a little better than the PS3 when programming in standard, manageable ways. The PS3's processors are worthless if the games you are developing don't have tasks that can be consistently handed out to 8 different threads (and it's more complicated than that when you consider that certain processors are really only efficient for specific types of tasks). It's incredibly unlikely that there will ever be a game developed which successfully taps the PS3's full "potential." It's really only accessible in limited applications.
Existing User Log In
New User Registration
Register for a free account to gain full access to the VGChartz Network and join our thriving community.
