The 3rd Party Balance Sheet of Terror

[amirnetz]

Ender said:
Given sales and the 360's ease of development, these results aren't too shocking.

The results are much more striking that I expected. A-priory I would have assumed that the list of 360 exclusives would be much smaller as a PS3 port expand the addressable market by 60%. So as long as the port costs less than 60% of the initial development cost then it would make sense to go multi-plat across the board.

But apparently this logic does not work for small developers. For the smaller developers it is much simpler and faster to develop for the 360 architecture natively. The architecture is very much a PC architecture and it is easy to find developers familiar with it. The development tools are world class (Visual Studio is top notch). The final quality is higher and the testing is easier with a single platform. No compromises are needed when there is only one target platform.

The cost of porting apparently is much more significant than us in the forums can appreciate. The architectures are so different between the platforms (3 cores vs 7 sp, 512MB vs 256MB RAM etc) that the port process is risky and fraught with problems.

We also have to remember that when the development is completed on the leading platform (mostly the 360), the studio is often suffering from  cash liquidity problems as they have been burning the money for years on the initial development without seeing any income from the title. The studio needs money urgently. Management want to release here and now and start seeing the sales dollars. A port at this point is another substantial expense, significant added risk and a delay of the revenue stream.

So I guess this is why you are seeing many more 3rd party exclusives than we have suspected at the initial process.