I see a lot of EA badmouthing and, although they deserve it to a certain extent, I don't think most people realize how difficult it is for them to execute their business plan on these current generation HD consoles ...
Unlike most other developers, EA's business plan is based off of yearly installments of people's favourite games; all of their games have strict deadlines every year which have to be met and (almost) no delay is acceptable. What this means is that the increase in man-power needed to produce an XBox 360 or PS3 game is made up almost entirely by increasing the development team size. As anyone who understands software development methodologies will tell, you the larger a development team gets the less likely it will produce a quality product in the end.
Now, why are the XBox 360 versions 'Better'?
I still stand by my assumption that Microsoft is helping EA produce the game as much as EA will let them; by spending less than $1 Million per year Microsoft can ensure that every EA team working on an XBox 360 product has access to a team of Uber-Guru XBox 360 engineers. Microsoft has access to engineers who helped develop the XBox 360 and designed all of the SDK examples that the developers at EA used to lear about the system; these people can look at the instructions and data structures that EA is using and suggest changes that will give amazing performance gains.
Why isn't Sony helping?
I belive Sony isn't helping on the same level as Microsoft because it has been nearly a decade since Sony had to lift a finger to attract any developer; by 1998 the Playstation was so dominant that it didn't need to be sold to developers anymore, and the PS2 sold so well out of the gate developers would kill their grandma to develop games for it. Right now I have the feeling that Sony believes it doesn't have to attract developers (or encourage them to produce better games) because they will eventually just "See the Light" and start focusing their efforts on the PS3; at the same time I believe they have the same feeling about gamers.
