| Squilliam said: @Procrastinato: Its a lot more complicated than that. By leading on the PS3 you make it harder to port to the PC which is an important consideration for 3 platform games. Furthermore just because working on the PS3 forces you to parrellise immediately from the beginning, doesn't mean anything really as any good design would take advantage of all three cores anyway and any bad design on the PS3 would still use one core just like on the Xbox 360 and switching lead platforms isn't going to change anything. Furthermore of the two games which were developed relatively seperately that I know of, Call of Duty IV and Grand Theft Auto IV ran extremely well on the Xbox 360 without needing to port from the PS3. |
You're going to have to elaborate on why you think having a multi-threaded, asynchronous engine design would be something that's hard to port to a PC.
As far as leading on the 360 goes -- there's really only one thing stopping devs from just making good parallel architectures from the start on the 360 -- they're not used to it. That was my point -- the PS3 screams "make the engine parallel!" to the engineers, and this just yields better results when both platforms are considered. I'm not saying that good games cannot start on the 360 and be ported to the PS3 -- I'm saying that EA, and other devs, are making the right decision in choosing the PS3 as a base dev platform -- oddly because the 360 is so easy to use, and so familiar. The 360 makes a great receptacle for the awesomeness of an async engine developed on the PS3, as well as a great console to develop exclusives on.
The PS3, in its high-performance crazyness is demanding, and like it or not, demanding requirements yield impressive technology, in the end. I know that's kinda lame, considering the 360's thoughtful, engineering-friendly design and excellent development environment... but its the truth, and that's what it boils down to, in the end. Cost-to-develop, performance, review scores and press, ultimate yield.
EA chose to dev on the PS3 first because of the 360's ease of use, and amenable design. There are some bonus performance gains to the strategy as well, but... irony at its finest, I agree.
